I've been bitten by things like this from an entirely unexpected angle - messengers like teams and skype sometimes <helpfully> replace characters like "-" and " " with all manner of more readable unicode characters. More readable, until the YAML parser choked.
Since that, I pretty much always run some variant of the gremlins plugin, which highlights pretty much all unicode spaces, dashes and other weird control symbols.
Chat apps replacing ™ with a horrifically large, poorly-rendered and off-colored "TM" and ruining The Joke™ is a major pet peeve of mine, yeah :| And even worse, it seems to be spreading, as each one blindly copies the horrible decisions of the others. I would disable all of those auto-replacements everywhere if only I could disable all of those auto-replacements everywhere.
Since that, I pretty much always run some variant of the gremlins plugin, which highlights pretty much all unicode spaces, dashes and other weird control symbols.