When people can't remember the actual math, they seem to fall back on the acronym, but they're not using it correctly. I've seen people try to correct them by writing it as PE(DM)(AS) to indicate when priority is equal. I can respect that attempt.
When I tutored math that's usually how I would explain it. But what's really frustrating to me is when teachers make no distinction between things in math that are just arbitrarily established conventions, versus things that are actually provably true. When a student asks "Why do we go in the PEMDAS order?", it is technically correct to say "Because that's the easiest way to do it", because that is why we do it; it's just some arbitrary convention, and we had to make up some consistent rules, so why not those rules. But if you just leave the answer at that, the student walks away thinking that that's how everything in math works, we just make up rules to follow, and then being "good at math" is just a matter of memorizing and applying those rules.
PEMDAS isn't really a feature of math, it's a feature of language, which just happens to only be relevant when you're talking about something mathematical, in the same way that "four" is a feature of language, but you only ever use it to express a mathematical idea. But the fact that you learn about it in a math class makes your brain lump it together with all other "math", and that makes you more inclined to think that everything else in that category was equally arbitrary.