Was this meant to be a title instead of part of the code block?

No, this is intentional. Originally, I tried to put this in an inline lieteral:

The use of extra literal quotes around the text (````'extra'````) is discouraged.

However, it appears that four backticks followed by a single-quote or double-quote character are not interpreted correctly by Sphinx/ReST (in contrast followed by a letter works, e.g.````literal```` further above).

I would like to have the negative example shown somewhere, but did not manage to write it as an inline literal. So I just added it it to the block literal.