Broken axes aren't the solution. Starting from 0 is but nobody making graphs seems to understand or, in the case of journalists, they're trying to mislead their readers. I suppose readers enjoy being awed by dramatically changing graphs too.
In my unhinged pipedreams, we’d have some sort of standard for conveying the data directly so users could use browser settings to decide how to display the data. There like a dozen people in the world that would use it, but they’d really really enjoy it I bet.
Readers are guilty too - they like to see wiggly lines wiggle. Nobody wants to see a graph that's just a horizontal line or shaded band. We want to peer harder at it to tease out any sort of signal that can tell our emotional brains "good" or "bad".