I've had a few profs that would the ellipsis for every single sentence, and my brain subconsciously treated his emails as mysterious. It's not too bad once you get used to it.
There's also the weird thing of younger people like myself avoiding proper punctuation/capitalization for the aesthetic. Mainly because a lack of proper writing can make certain messages feel more "relaxed" and casual, if that makes sense.
I don't think it's weird at all, and I don't think it's simply aesthetic. All these things (punctuation, capitalization, emoji/emoticons, representations of non-verbal communication like "lol" and "hmm", message boundaries, message send times) are ways of conveying tone, nuance, and a personal voice in an otherwise sterile, flat medium.
These nuances have been around as long as we've had instant messaging, but the specifics have changed over time. Representations of laughter are a good example: over the years we've had (in no order) "lol", "Lol", "LOL", "rofl", "ROFL", "lmao", "lmfao", "LMAO", "LMFAO", "hah", "haha", "hahaha", "HAHAHAHA", "roflmao", "roflcopter", and others. Over time the nuances of these options have changed, with some no longer au courant (the rofl family is currently outmoded), just as spoken slang and language rapidly evolve. Punctuation choices and so on follow similar patterns.
I do roll my eyes a little bit at some of the wild prescriptivism that can be found in this thread, which I think completely misses the point. The footnote from the original post I find especially infuriating:
>sloppy with their written communication, which is to say "careless and unsystematic; excessively casual".
Casual speech is not sloppy! Choices of punctuation, capitalization, and so on are deliberate.
the people gatekeeping language are the same people that don't understand why age discrimination happens
So in order to avoid throwing your anecdata altogether, how many people of each age group did you communicate with using text form?
It could also be a case of when I do see it used regardless of age, it appears to either be overused, or rarely used, and overuse tends to lean older.
I'm 28 for reference, and I get VERY different vibes from those younger than me who join slack, and those older (40+ or so). The difference in meaning for different punctuation for these crowds is SO evident, I feel like I'm always playing translator for even the language I grew up speaking and writing.
The biggest example of this is the ellipsis among the older crowd. In informal messaging that I grew accustomed to it went from being overused, to nowadays seeming like you are being sarcastic or angry about something. So among the younger crowd I see it almost never used anymore. On the other hand the older generations picked it up from how we used to use it, as a sort of pause. But they co-opted it as probably the most common punctuation used in their messaging. I'm not joking when I will sometimes receive a message from an older coworker that will contain an ellipsis every 5 words or so.
It's always been interesting deciphering the actual meaning of some messages based on solely age of the sender.
This all to say, deciphering punctuation at all in informal writing is an interesting game.