Every tool and shell that lay in arm's reach treated the comma as a perfectly normal and unobjectionable character in a filename.
WTF. After 40 years maybe I should have figured that one out.Until someone forces you to use a file system that cannot tolerate commas...
It's not a completely non special character: for instance in bash it's special inside braces in the syntax where "/{,usr/}bin" expands to "/bin /usr/bin". But the need to start that syntax with the open brace will remind you about the need to escape a literal comma there if you ever want one.