It's not academic, to be sure.
I'm not so sure it's not at least partly mainstream. No data.
(1) "Like" is counted as a discourse marker.
This seems not unreasonable an intro to it. There are better, but I'm not taking the time.
people.duke.edu/~eec10/tagliamonte_2005.pdf
Notice this is from 2005 and cites a fair amount of literature. It's old knowledge. Not as old as how symbols work--that's a century old. But the distribution and function of "like" isn't a mystery.
All languages have them. But they're usually a property of informal, colloquial, spoken language. It's considered good form in broad transcription to elide them. In that kind of transcription, you clean up ungrammaticality, break up sentences, generally clean up the text. (In very close transcriptions you indicate pauses and gaps, and every "um" and "oh." One way of making your team look good and the other team to look bad is to switch between transcription styles. Your guy looks articulate, intelligent, while the other guy can't string three words together. Comparing apples and apples might yield the same conclusion, the opposite, or that they're similar. Much safer to place both elbows on the scale--why risk just a thumb?)
Some consider (or perhaps "considered" is better) "um" and even "like" to be dysfluencies. But dysfluencies also serve to structure the discourse.
(2) "Like" also serves as a dialect marker. It says something about this where this Duggar's places himself in the overall scheme of dialects and groups. "Home schooler" isn't it, even though he may have been home schooled.
In some ways it's like the (later) spread of vocal fry, starting in about the same center of innovation and spreading by the same means. We get layers of these fads built up.
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