Ex-academic here. I too use/tended to use em-dashes quite a bit. It's easy to compose in Linux (Gnome) with a real keyboard: Ctrl Shift U 2014 is ingrained in my head from using them all the time in my academic work.

As an em-dash abuser I have decided that it is a crutch to not think through what I am saying--I can lazily connect a stream of thoughts rather than think clearly and explicitly form sentence transitions and so on

Are you familiar with the 'Compose' key/xcompose?