I guess I don't have a super strong opinion here either. Ironically, coming from someone who spends a significant portion of their day reading raw org/markdown documents with no problem, something about even the ASCII style markup in the title looks wrong to me. I don't do SEO and nothing in
MDN's article indicates that non word characters have a negative affect anyway but it just looks strange to my eyes.
I guess regardless it sounds like if I were to go to the trouble of making a patch for this it would be good to make sure that it was behind an option and probably defaulting to the current HEAD behavior of including the ASCII markup with an option to strip the non-word characters from it.