Ocassionally I write commands in my notes app before copying and pasting them into iTerm. It’s very easy to type “regular quotes” and not notice macOS has converted them into “smart quotes”.
Then your command doesn’t run, and you get an error message that doesn’t make any sense because the arguments aren’t being parsed correctly, but you don’t notice at first it’s the quotes that are wrong because the font is too small and your mind is fixated on looking for spelling mistakes and syntax problems…
To turn them off, on a Mac go to:
System Preferences > Keyboard > Text > uncheck “Use smart quotes and dashes”