I never learned the acronym for PEDMAS (or its variants), but I have seen how it's been misused. The problem with PEDMAS is that it can be interpreted to mean that you divide before you multiply and that you add before you subtract, when those operator pairs are equal in priority (and should therefore be done left to right).
For example, we have:
8-6+4=?
If you literally read PEDMAS as doing addition first, then you conclude the answer is -2. But since addition and subtraction have the same priority, you go from left to right, so the answer is actually 6.
Instead of learning PEDMAS, I just learned that the operators were grouped together, which makes sense, since subtraction is just addition and division is just multiplication. I just learned that multiplication happens before addition. Then we learned parentheses. Exponents would have come later. By the time I got to that point, we had known the order of operations.
I wouldn't teach PEDMAS if I were in a classroom. From what it sounds like, it's fairly ubiquitous, so I guess I'd be doing a disservice by ignoring the acronym. I would definitely teach it as PE(DM)(AS). Maybe use colors PEDMAS. It was actually one of those annoying trolling equations where I saw someone claim an entirely different answer because she used PEDMAS incorrectly, so now I'm wary of that tool.