Hacks (that should never be used) to unescape quotes in meta tags in WordPress

01-output-buffer.php

<?php
// HACK #1: Replace escaped quotes
ob_start();
wp_head();
echo str_replace('&#039;', '’', ob_get_clean());

02-override-esc-attr.php

<?php // wp-includes/formatting.php

// HACK #2: Drop `ENT_QUOTES` from `esc_attr` in the WordPress core

/**
 * Escaping for HTML attributes.
 *
 * @since 2.8.0
 *
 * @param string $text
 * @return string
 */
function esc_attr( $text ) {
    $safe_text = wp_check_invalid_utf8( $text );
    
    // BEFORE
    // $safe_text = _wp_specialchars( $safe_text, ENT_QUOTES );
    // AFTER
    $safe_text = _wp_specialchars( $safe_text );
    
    /**
     * Filters a string cleaned and escaped for output in an HTML attribute.
     *
     * Text passed to esc_attr() is stripped of invalid or special characters
     * before output.
     *
     * @since 2.0.6
     *
     * @param string $safe_text The text after it has been escaped.
     * @param string $text      The text prior to being escaped.
     */
    return apply_filters( 'attribute_escape', $safe_text, $text );
}