Sod that mate. The real problem is the weird quotes thing hereabouts. English uses 66 and 99 or this:". We never use double backticks and whatever the other thing is.
US QWERTY keyboards like the author is almost certainly using have the backtick above the Tab key, shared with ~, and it’s commonly used in programming.
I blame Microsoft, as it was their software where I was first introduced to "smart" quotes using the extending characters/glyphs of fonts. I can also tell when importing someone's data that was copy/pasted from an Office type program with its auto"correcting" to smart typography.