People do like to exaggerate simple problems.
Computers need a sort of general 'debugger', you should be able to click on something and ask the computer why it did that, or what is this (a bit like web pages have 'inspect') ... so you could click on the unicode quote and ask "What is this? Why is it here? How do I change it?"
(cue yesterday's article about command line interfaces and reification, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15619796 )
Not so sure - anyone who’s ever copied and pasted from an arbitrary WordPress blog that adds smart quotes to code snippets, for example, will have encountered this.
In all seriousness—they look better, can be nested without escaping, and provide redundancy that makes for better error messages in the event of a runaway string literal. What’s not to love?
There’s a number of good code editing app on the platform (which won’t be affected by this), and otherwise I think it happens to most of us to just open a text editor and type a snippet we send to someone or run in JS or on a terminal.