I've been using double hyphens (which auto-corrects to emdash now) for as long as I can remember. Now that it's a marker of AI, I find myself removing it whenever I reply to comments.
While I've seen it in tooling like markdown--with two being an endash--that's very very wide... I am very sure the convention has always been to use two hyphens for an mdash (which is even easier to type! ;P).
I myself only discovered them for the first time when reading a punctuation site to ensure I was using semicolons grammatically correctly.