The problem is not the backticks. They were just used as quote characters. The problem is that shell expansion doesn't escape the characters. E.g. this is a cut down output from my system now after I did a echo >'/tmp/ space ':

    $ echo /tmp/*
    /tmp/bspwm_0_0-socket /tmp/config-err-Q667kI /tmp/foolog /tmp/ space  /tmp/...

Parse that output and you get a broken list of filenames.

The back ticks were supposed to be quotes, I meant to say

echo *

However as per replies, this suffers from the same issues as ls.