This isn't universal.

The New York Times Manual of Style, for instance, only permits using an en dash as a minus sign. Joining nouns like Sarbanes-Oxley and even number ranges use hyphens instead.

The BBC News Style Guide and the Economist Style Guide similarly use hyphens in place of en dashes - though sometimes BBC seems to use en dashes in place of em dashes.

The University of Cambridge Style Guide simply says to avoid dashes altogether.

The AMA Manual of Style explicitly declares that one should hyphenate two or more nouns of equal importance. They however continue to use the en dash when the first word in the compound modifies more than one word (e.g. anti–Norwalk virus).

The US General Printing Office Style Guide also uses hyphens, so the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is hyphenated in documents published by Congress.

The Chicago Manual of Style nearly got rid of the en dash as well, but backtracked after backlash.

That’s how we distinguish the Cox–Zucker Machine [1] from other Cox-Zucker Machines (scnr)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox–Zucker_machine

At a Denny's once, I received a kid's menu with a blurb purporting to reveal the trendy new slang words kids were using. I read with interest, but found only contrived nonces like "sloovy." As a kid I could tell that this menu was fake news.

Ceasing the happy tradition of using the hyphen between equal-weighted nouns because of a hacker news comment is the moral equivalent of adopting expletives from the kids menu at a diner.

Apparently the first use of the hyphen disagrees:

> The first known documentation of the hyphen is in the grammatical works of Dionysius Thrax. At the time, hyphenation was joining two pieces of text that might otherwise be read as two separate words by a low tie mark. This was necessary due to the ambiguity inherent in the lack of word spacing. In Greek these marks were known as enotikon, officially romanized as a hyphen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphen