No, it is (somewhat) unique to tex.  If you write `word' tex would turn that into a pair of opposing quotes in the typeset document, as opposed to 'word' (the convention in regular text/emails/posts/etc) where you'd just see ascii quotes.  tex would render 'word' as a closing quote both before and after word, which looks weird in typeset text.

There's no bug here; as you say we aren't interested in making the docstrings parseable as restructured text (at least, I'm not).  For me, this is about getting rid of the now-odd-looking tex leftovers and making the ascii styling consistent with the bulk of our docstrings.

It's not a big deal, though.