effective-shell | Text , samples and website for my 'Effective Shell ' series | Runtime Evironment library

1. Am I correct that wildcard expansion results in a set of strings that contain escaped special characters

No. There is no need for the shell to escape special characters at that point, because filename expansion is the last word expansion to be performed; strings resulting from it are not subjected to word splitting or any other expansion; they stay as-is. This is documented in the manual as follows:

The order of expansions is: brace expansion; tilde expansion, parameter and variable expansion, arithmetic expansion, and command substitution (done in a left-to-right fashion); word splitting; and filename expansion.