Why is light always used as an example while glorifying a black hole? In almost any article, video, books on a black hole that I have come across, this is the common sentence I have read or heard:
"Nothin can escape a black hole, not even light."
But no one explains why they emphasise on "light". As if light is something that is capable of escaping almost anything but with one exception... that is the black hole.
I have asked this question to people in-person who have used this sentence but none have been able to answer it. I guess people who are not in this field just copy-paste what they hear or read elsewhere without truly understanding it just to sound intelligent lol.
 A: Light is used as an example precisely because people usually assume it, among all other things, is free to travel at the highest possible speed unaffected by gravity. What other example would you use instead? A Ferrari? A rocket? Superman?
Using light as the example has the added advantage of explaining why the black hole is referred to as being black, thus killing two explanatory birds with one stone.
A: Light is composed of elementary particles called photons, which have zero mass and always travel with the velocity light has in vacuum, c.
Photons can always "escape" a surface of a star, and that is the reason we can see stars. Generally it can escape heavenly bodies, with the exception of the black hole. That is because  of general relativity the energy the photon has makes it vulnerable to gravitational attraction,as a zero mass particle  it has to follow the  geodesics of GR. This is confirmed as seen in the collective light deflection when passing large masses.
The black hole, because it is a singularity, has no geodesics crossing the horizon, so nothing can come out.
A: Even though copy-pasting has always been and still is a widespread practice among those who want to sound intelligent, I don't believe that this is the case for this pretty superficial phrase. Actually, I am seriously wondering whom you asked, that they were not able to provide an explanation.
Since gravity already for the layman means acceleration of masses in the gravitational field, and light always travels at light speed (and therefore, is unable to experience acceleration in the traditional sense...), I cannot recognize anything mysterious in the statement that "even light" gets affected by the gravity of a black hole so much that it is unable to escape.
However, on a deeper level this statement unveils a slight misunderstanding of how gravity in general affects light. It is not the case that gravity leaves light completely unaffected because "light has no mass", but gravity only leaves the speed of light unaffected, while it always affects its frequency/wavelength (and btw also its direction). This is called gravitational redshift, and it is there for ordinary stars as well as for black holes. The only aspect where black holes are special is that the redshift is so strong that light emitted from close to the event horizon ends up with a frequency arbitrarily close to zero (or nearly infinite wavelength) for the distant observer.
So, if you want to be a real smartass and nag people who claim "not even light can escape a black hole", you could respond "actually light can even escape (the surface of) a black hole, but with zero frequency". Not to be taken too serious, of course...
A: People focus on the inability of light to escape because the media focuses on it. It’s the most popular characteristic but there are much more interesting questions about light/photons than their escape being overtaken by a black hole.
If black holes exist (plasmoids are worth considering), one wonders if photons even survive once absorbed by the singularity. No one really knows the state of matter and energy inside the singularity.
It seems that along with focusing on light supposedly not being able to escape everyone also focuses on the limitations of photons once they cross the event horizon and not so much on the survivability of photons once absorbed by the singularity.
Another issue affecting the potential escape of light from a black hole is the speculated Hawking Radiation that over time could cause a black hole to lose mass and reappear as a visible mass. Hawking said matter/energy can escape from a black hole through radiation or evaporation. This would include photons if they still exist inside the singularity.
There are other very interesting points of discussion regarding photon escape from a black hole but I’ll end it here.
