Hi,

Unfortunately this falls into the realm of changes to syntax. The current
behavior is not a bug and is working as specified because hyphen minus
(U+002D) does not count as punctuation for the purposes of org syntax.
We should specify which chars count as punctuation in the syntax doc.
As noted by Eric \(\) has no such restrictions.

From https://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-syntax.html#Entities_and_LaTeX_Fragments

POST is any punctuation (including parentheses and quotes) or space character, or the end of line.

With this patch, I also propose to change the specification
accordingly. The change is local and minor.

Regards,

-- 
Sébastien Miquel