The manual contains the advice:

   • If a line in a documentation string begins with an
     open-parenthesis, write a backslash before the open-parenthesis,
     like this:

          The argument FOO can be either a number
          \(a buffer position) or a string (a file name).

     This prevents the open-parenthesis from being treated as the start
     of a defun (*note Defuns: (emacs)Defuns.).

First of all, is this still true? I rarely bother escaping brackets in doc strings and it doesn't seem to cause any editing confusion. For example, beginning-of-defun doesn't seem to be fooled by a '(' in column 1 inside a doc string.
(I do escape the (fn ...) annotation, probably out of superstition.)

Moreover, these backslashes appear a bit everywhere (not just doc strings), not only at bol, and not only before an opening bracket. They make reading and editing the text a bit more difficult. More importantly, they are a constant source of potential mistakes, especially in regexps.

I have a tool to scan for all of them (using the help-echo annotation by emacs-lisp-mode), but it would be much more useful if we were to remove all existing occurrences. A list of all red backslashes attached.