Comment by brachkow

In Eastern Europe, a lot of computer-savvy people write with em dashes. I see two reasons behind that:

1. There is a highly popular Cyrillic keyboard layout with an em dash made by design educator Ilya Birman – https://ilyabirman.net/typography-layout.

2. His colleague, Maxim Ilyahov is the author of an extremely popular book on writing good copy. Somehow, this book was a bestseller for years and was read by all kinds of common folk. I once saw a janitor reading it on a break!