Why do linters pick on useless escape character?

Question

Escaping non-special characters in strings, template literals, and regular expressions doesn\'t have any effect

Source: https://eslint.org/d

Answer 1

If the escape character isn't doing anything useful, what is it doing there?

Perhaps the writer of the code wanted a literal backslash character. The error draws attention to it so they can replace \ with \\.

Perhaps they thought the next character needed escaping. This educates them otherwise.

Perhaps it is just a typo.

Since there is no good reason to have the \ there, there can only be bad reasons. Some are more seriously bad than others, but the linter will draw attention to them.