alt Hacker NewsIt's a fad that has been going strong for centuries in published literature, so I'd guess an awful lot of authors world disagree with you.
You can restructureany sentence to use fewer forms of punctuation -- but if you do that, you'll lose nuance. And nuance, in writing, is a very fine thing.
The em-dash has indeed been around for centuries, but the fad I refer to is its overuse in contemporary American prose. IF you look at Google Books n-gram viewer, you can see it went through a surge of popularity over a few decades that then fell off sharply.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%E2%80%93&year...
It's also notable that the em-dash is approved in American Manuals of Style, while discouraged in British ones. I was unable to find longitudinal data for the em-dash's use in magazines, blogs etc., but AI summaries suggest it's 3-4 times more used in those contexts than in news reports.
Like strawberry ice cream or apple pie, nuance is certainly a fine thing; but a surfeit of it becomes cloying, and the antipathy toward the omnipresence of the em-dash in LLM-generated prose, along with other kinds of literary expression like contrast and comparison, suggests to me that people have had more than enough of it.