I’m pretty sure there is a setting in Word that allows you to turn off the automatic conversion of quotes. And I think that defaulting to performing the replace

I’m pretty sure there is a setting in Word that allows you to turn off the automatic conversion of quotes. And I think that defaulting to performing the replacement is sane, as most people do just type “"” whenever they need any quotation mark and cases where “curly” quotation marks are appropriate are much more common than straight-quote cases outside of tech-related contexts.