That article talks about escaping reserved characters ($) in a design template (Velocity). My question was around escaping the value of the entity's output. In particular, double quotes in content cause problems when trying to generate JSON syntax or HTML attribute syntax.
My solution: Without the ability escape in Velocity, I escape the content before uploading in the product feed. A good compromise for most scenarios is to html encode double quotes to " . In practice that is working well.
In most cases, the end result will be inserting it into an HTML document (web page, email, etc) where it will work properly. Should you ever need plain text, you'll need to decode html.