Is "Emergence" a Mechanism or a Placeholder?

Theory

It feels like we are circling back to the mid-nineties obsession with complex adaptive systems. Back then, any pattern that looked vaguely organic was labeled emergent until the actual mathematics of the system were worked out. Now, we see the same trend in papers on consciousness and cellular signaling. The term is ubiquitous in high-impact literature, yet it rarely accompanies a testable hypothesis. When we say a property emerges from the interaction of simpler parts, we are often just admitting that the interaction is too complex to map. It functions as a linguistic stop-sign: once you label something emergent, the pressure to explain the specific causal chain seems to vanish. There is a difference between identifying a pattern and explaining a process. Calling a behavior emergent describes what is happening, but it does not explain how it happens. At what point does the label of emergence stop being a useful descriptor and start being a way to avoid doing the hard work of mechanistic decomposition? Is it a legitimate category of physical phenomena, or is it just a sophisticated way of saying we have not found the variables yet?