It depends on how the document is written, but \> stops matching on a period, comma, apostrophe, space, newline, what have you. Word boundary matching is just very handy.
As to why its that set of characters… Honestly I have no idea :) Regexes are just what they are and I assume the special escape made sense to the inventor at least.



You are dead on. I hate this, if I want this sort of trite shit I can just ask ChatGPT. Instead people now take AI slop and make articles about it so more AIs can ingest it and spit it back again. One step closer to Dead Internet.