almost every semicolon used in writing is a complete hail mary. I've never once been confident with the use of a semicolon.
every time i read a semicolon i think "that must be right. they wouldn't put that there if it wasn't correct"
every time i write a semicolon i think "this is wrong. there is no way i used that right. i'm a fraud. they will see through me. my mentors would be ashamed of me. i should delete this entire document as penance for my audacity"
When I first saw this I thought "That sounds about right, I use semicolons when I overelaborate on things because I'm feeling less confident about the thing I'm talking about", then I read a few more sentences and realized "oh, it's about the punctuation mark's proper grammatical usage"
the way to know when to use a semicolon is: do you want to use one? people can like that decision or not but that doesn't make it Objectively Wrong
hell, the internet gave us entirely new conventions on punctuation that are commonly accepted in certain circles, like ending a sentence with a comma,