That is what I've done for the past couple decades. There are dozens of us! Dozens!

Same. I feel like I've been using "--" in my online writing for decades now. Take that, LLMs; I used it before it was cool... er... before it was a weak signal that a piece of text was written by an LLM.

Sigh.

I did that until I learned to use TeX last millennium, but it's a pernicious bad habit in TeX, so I stopped.

Space en-dash space is standard British typography – whereas US uses em-dash and jams the words together on either side of it.

It took centuries for the written word to acquire spaces between words, and then the US decided to jam them back together again.

Curious why folk are using two hyphens "--" instead of en-dash.

Because it's not a special character.

I imagine for the same reason some still use two spaces after full stops - typewriter conventions.

In LaTeX (and probably smartypants which is another of those bare pre-unicode ASCII to fancy text converters that can get stacked into markdown--but I can't remember if dash handling specifically is in there), "--" is en-dash and "---" is em-dash. The single "-" gives a hypen which is handled differently than an en-dash in typesetting.

So... that's just to say that people who are exposed to the sorts of can't-unsee-it-now typesetting OCD that LaTeX and various popular extension packages within that ecosystem exposes can learn to write write "--" as en-dash.

It's sort of like being unable to return to the blissful state of not being hyperaware that Ariel and Helvetica are different.