Automatic conversions have been happening for a long time. In fact, a few years ago there was some combination of settings on my terminal locale settings and man (well, troff/groff most likely) was converting hyphens in param definitions to some sort of dash character, meaning I couldn't copy and paste out of the man page. I think it also affected perldoc for the same reason.

I don't doubt there are publishing platforms that do it automatically as well, so I wouldn't count on seeing them as an indicator of generated output, even if it may be processed in some manner.