Yes, people use the em dash. The point isn't the em dash itself. It's about U+2014. Yeah, in a book, or maybe a quality article, you'd type the em dash properly. But most of the time online? I write it as - or as --.
i have espanso set up to quick replace "-=" with — on desktop and on my phone i use futo keyboard, which has the aesthetically inspring em dash one hold and swipe on the h key away.
So that’s just a bad signal