I think you're underestimating how frequently some folks do things like: for x in 'seq 1 100'; do echo "something with $x"; done

(Please forgive lack of backticks on my cellphone keyboard) Or many variations, like every line in a file, or result of a command piped to sed or awk and then processed. Init scripts are about the only shell scripts I write anymore, but I use frequently use it from the commandline, typically on remote terminals.

Just forget backticks even exist.

I now always use $(cmd) instead of `cmd`. Much easier to read and it fits in better with process substitution <(cmd). More importantly it all nests sanely $(cmd1 $(cmd2)) and works well in quotes "Blah: $(cmd1 $(cmd2))".