echo is proven to be non-standard among the commandline tools.
anyway using double backslashes donates that there should be a backslash.
using 1,3,5 or so on, escapes the next character.
that's ok behavior in my mind.

the issue I do see here is that the leading backslashes are not escaped.

another issue I do see that I can't reproduce your issue
just tried out and my Wkix32.exe 4.52 beta2 does not do this.
nor did 4.51
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