Technically … yes this can be disabled by Discourse admins, we have the setting enable markdown typographer which amends a bunch of stuff in cooked:
Use typography rules to improve readability of text: replace straight quotes ' with curly quotes ’, (c) (tm) with symbols, -- with emdash –, etc
Glad to hear that the unformatted code detector is helping out.
I think there is some opportunity here for some GPT-4 integration to do some smart things here and catch even more of these. The unfortunate thing though is that the APIs are really slow at the moment so this would have to come after the fact.