Confused about git-config's description of escaping

When describing the configuration syntax, the git-config manpage says this about the value:

    Inside double quotes, double quote " and backslash \ characters must
    be escaped: use \" for " and \\ for \.

I find the "Inside double quotes" part confusing because escaping these characters appears to also be needed when there are no enclosing double quotes:

    $ nl .git/config | tail -n2
         6	[a]
         7		b = c"d

    $ git config a.b
    fatal: bad config line 7 in file .git/config

    $ git version
    git version 2.28.0.236.gb10cc79966

I was going to suggest dropping the "Inside double quotes" qualifier. Perhaps

    Double quote " and backslash \ characters in the value must
    be escaped: use \" for " and \\ for \.

But it looks like that's pretty close to how this sentence was written before ff5507ed2a (Documentation/config.txt: describe the structure first and then meaning, 2015-03-04), which makes me think that I'm misreading the description or otherwise missing something.

What's gained by specifying "Inside double quotes"? Are there any cases where a value, whether enclosed in double quotes or not, doesn't need " or \ characters escaped?

Kyle Meyer <kyle@kyleam.com> writes:

Perhaps there is another description missing, either from the written docs or from your reading of it, that says that a value with these characters must be enclosed in double quotes pair?

Junio C Hamano writes:

[...]

Thanks for the reply.

I'm not spotting anything in the current git-config documentation that says that. And it would be an incorrect description of the syntax, wouldn't it? When entering a value containing a quote with 'git config', enclosing double quotes aren't inserted:

    $ git config a.b 'c"d'
    $ tail -n2 .git/config
    [a]
    	b = c\"d
    $ git config a.b
    c"d

So, it seems valid for a value to have these characters escaped without having them enclosed in a pair of double quotes.