Granted, there are good podcasts, but I've switched my listening time (mostly commute for in office once a week) to audiobooks. I find books to be much more consistently high quality content, regardless of the source. There are bad books, but the quality tends to be higher than podcasts. I mostly get audiobooks through my library, but I also sometimes listen through Spotify.
I'm from a blue class family in a non-affluent area and I could already read going into Kindergarten because my mom spent a lot of time reading with me before I got to school. This was 25+ years ago.
I will admit I'm more like to use "--" and not bother converting it if not done automatically on quick forum posts. You can find examples in my post history. But I come across them all the time in written works.
Many devices and word processors will convert "--" into an em-dash. On longer posts, I often write in a word processor and then copy-paste to a text field.
On Android and iOS, you press and hold the "-" to get the "–" and "—" options.
On Mac, use opt + hyphen for "–" and opt + shift + hyphen for "—" (similar to other special characters).
On Linux you can enable the compose key and use it similar to MacOS (Compose+---).
Meanwhile Microsoft removed WordPad in the latest version of Windows 11. It was a great simple word processor and text editor. It even supported docx and odt files.
Everything works without any fuss if you use Glorious Eggroll fork of Proton. I've played 100s of hours of AOE2 DE this year on Linux. Before it took manual steps, but I recently switched to a new distro, used GE, and needed nothing more: https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom