Using 5 technically different extremely similar glyphs for 4 extremely niche corner cases of typography is nonsense.
Text is not written only to be read visually by a human on printed paper. Arguably, text today is almost never used that way. What actually matters to humans is that text can be copied and pasted and rendered unambiguously. The distinction between minus-dash, dash, en dash, em dash and minus is pointless. It is literally impossible to confuse one for the other in actual usage. Same for all the 14 technically different quotes in the English language. Literally pointless to anyone but typography geeks.
These typographic rules are vestigial. We have inherited them from a time when it made no sense to limit the number of different characters used in script and it made no sense either to make it easy for a reader to figure out which typesetting blocks the typesetter put on the machine. Both of these things are now very important.
> Using 5 technically different extremely similar glyphs for 4 extremely niche corner cases of typography is nonsense.
They're not extremely niche — they are common and mostly obvious.
> What actually matters to humans is that text can be copied and pasted and rendered unambiguously
Yes. What is ambiguous is the hyphen-minus. It literally combines two meanings in its name.
> These typographic rules are vestigial.
They are still widely used, and still function as intended, so they are not vestigial.
> We have inherited them from a time when it made no sense to limit the number of different characters used in script
I would argue the opposite: they declined in use only because of a (temporary) limit to the number of characters available on some technologies. Thanks to Unicode the limit is removed and their use is increasing again.
I would also point out that in addition to the different dashes, there are (and with good reason) different hyphens. The hyphen-minus is too overloaded.
> minus-dash, dash, en dash, em dash and minus is pointless
Hyphens and em-dashes have literally opposite functions. Hyphens join words together, as in compound adjectives. Em-dashes separate clauses in a sentence. (And en-dashes are used for ranges.)
Text is not written only to be read visually by a human on printed paper. Arguably, text today is almost never used that way. What actually matters to humans is that text can be copied and pasted and rendered unambiguously. The distinction between minus-dash, dash, en dash, em dash and minus is pointless. It is literally impossible to confuse one for the other in actual usage. Same for all the 14 technically different quotes in the English language. Literally pointless to anyone but typography geeks.
These typographic rules are vestigial. We have inherited them from a time when it made no sense to limit the number of different characters used in script and it made no sense either to make it easy for a reader to figure out which typesetting blocks the typesetter put on the machine. Both of these things are now very important.