There is then some additional confusion coming from the fact that there are diffetent ways how backquote/quasiquote is really implemented by the reader:

For CL it is entirely valid to implement whole logic of backquote in the ` read macro and expand it into some nested combination of list, append and quote at read time. Scheme specifies what ` and friends expand into which then is implemented as normal m8acros (which is also valid and somehow common implementation in CL). Elisp is slightly weird in that ` originally was normal macro and thus ` read macro expands `(foo) into (` foo).