Actually, I was taught to use em-dashes for advanced writing when I was learning English as a foreign language. But these days, people say it looks like AI and tell me not to use them. It's really confusing
That's part of the divide between classroom teaching and boots-on-the-ground experience. Between them, I'll take the boots every time.
It's not just about em-dashes. It's also about specific sentence and phrase constructions.