I think that this is sad, because it is a useful pattern.

It is very frequent to find things about which a majority of the people wrongly believe that they are X, but in fact they are Y.

In such cases, you must point to them that "it's not X it's Y".

There are a few alternative ways to formulate this, but the alternatives are typically longer and more complex.

The same happens with em-dashes, which have valid uses and one should not care that there exist some people who are not familiar with the classic ways of using punctuation.

I do not believe that the right solution is to attempt to use more convoluted expressions or inappropriate punctuation in order to avoid to be accused of being a clanker.