Ultimately though, the thing with English is that it’s a complete dumpster fire of a language, and literally every rule has nearly as many exceptions as it does cases where it applies. The language didn’t evolve so much as it metastasized in fits and starts. Nearly every feature of the language from its words, to spelling, to grammar was either awkwardly bolted on from some other language, or it was just invented from whole cloth by some random printer or author (often with highly dubious logic driving it). This is just the latest iteration of that process with people inventing distinctions between characters that didn’t really exist in the past. Single quote is already a bit of an aberration, eventually it will likely just die out in actual usage and we’ll be left with this abortive calcified single quote character in the UTF character set to mark where it used to be.