Yeah it's really upsetting. Some of the most genuinely intelligent and insightful people I know have talked exactly like that (many still do), and I know they're people because a) I've met some of them, and b) they were doing this before generative AI was a thing. Generative AI stole the natural styles and voices of our best and brightest and is wearing them like a fucking Edgar suit. It's sick.

After all these years, I still don't get em-dashes. They seem like just a worse amalgamation of commas, semicolons, and brackets that lazy journalists use to avoid having to learn grammar.