How would you describe empathy? Emotion, trait, skill, process? It does prove helpful for human beings to connect with one another; having some sense of what another person is feeling is a good step toward meaningful communication.
But the term gets used a lot, and its use comes with some eye-rolls these days, kind of like "self esteem" did for an earlier generation. Cris Beam, a journalist, talked to people from many fields for her study of empathy and its origins and uses, I Feel You: The Surprising Power of Extreme Empathy.
Extreme?" No one got hurt in this interview from 2018.