That is so stupid.

Absolutely does not deserve a new character just for that(especially one that is so unusually large).

Whoever introduced that is absolutely drunk on power.

The only reason that exists is because of a power discrepancy where the people with powers to create new characters are also the ones who do enough writing that they feel such a specific and niche pain.

Did you notice the examples were really old? Like late 1700s old?

Now, imagine you have a wooden box of lead or pewter letter forms. They're small, heavy and backwards. You spend your days lining up those forms in rows and then pressing them to ink and paper to print books and documents.

So you're lining them up, slowly running out of 'e's and 'f's and 'r's. You decide to save yourself some time and more importantly some of your precious few letters that you need to make last the whole page. So you omit some of those words, names in this case, and establish a convention with other printers and authors about how and when to replace words with shorthand. This lets you and your fellow printers save time by not having to work to arrange those admittedly duplicate letters and stretch those letters.

Fun fact, that's why old 's' are sometimes written with an 'f' missing the bar. Because they were re-using forms where otherwise a letter was so common they'd run out!

Just because it’s a problem you’ve never encountered doesn’t make it stupid.

You’ve clearly never had to deal with a lot of references. Author lists can cluster. If you’re reading, it can get tedious if the last 5+ references are to the same three authors. Let alone 20+ references.

This happens. In some writing it happens _a lot_.

It’s a common enough that it’s even explicitly mentioned in the Chicago Manual [0], one of the main style guides for academic writing in the US:

> Em dashes also substitute for something missing. For example, in a bibliographic list, rather than repeating the same author over and over again, three consecutive em dashes (also known as a 3-em dash) stand in for the author’s name.

[0]: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/H...

I can’t tell if this is sarcasm.

If not, I doubt some typesetter in the 19th century (or earlier) was so drunk with power when setting out the lead type to make the 3-em dash.

EDIT: Additionally, unicode primarily exists to encode the typographic symbols that exist—that is to say, it's a catalog of what already is. Take Ogham[1] for example.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogham_(Unicode_block)

How do you feel about the Tironian Sign Capital Et? https://www.unicodecharacter.org/U+2E52

I mean the triple-em-dash has been around since Unicode 6.1; The Tironian Sign Capital Et wasn't added until Unicode 13.