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Ironically, in the list of examples of how to use <i> under Usage Notes, they actually use <em> instead.

Indeed: "<em>What is this writer talking about, anyway?</em>". I don't find that ironic, though; I think it bespeaks the carelessness with which the HTML "standard" is being jerked around by various unaccountable pressure groups.

Nonsense. This is MDN docs, not the spec. Don’t conflate or confuse them.

In this specific case, it’s probably just a bad mechanical translation, possibly from long ago as part of a batch i → em change, or possibly recent in their conversion from HTML to Markdown (might have done both em and i → *). Ill-conceived in either case, but not the end of the world.

You're right; I have conflated them, for many years. Fact is, MDN docs is a million times easier to read than the specs, which used to be clear, but are nowadays full of struckout text and references to other documents.

If MDN docs is autogenerated, that's regrettable. I swear I'm not going to fall back on W3Schools.

Incidentally, whatever happened to W3Schools? There was a time when every google search for anything remotely similar to web development came up with the top 5 links being to W3Schools. Nowadays not so much. Did google finally decide that W3Scools content amounted to disinformation?

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