The backslash issue: it escapes too much

I get why the backslash is used to escape the italic, bold, underline, and whatever other markdown characters that you might want to use as is in your message. I get why \* renders * and why \_ renders _. I even get why you can escape the backslash itself with another backslash in case you want to escape your escape character.

But here's the thing: why would you escape stuff like è, &, (, and all the other characters that have no markdown use? Well I don't know, and maybe that's where I'm wrong, but the backslash escapes every single special character no matter what. If I type \è it renders è, if I type \+ it renders + etc.

I figured there were something fishy, is there an explanation, or is it a bug?