I mean, I'm pretty certain I was taught in school to do things like this:

"It's only a block away," she said.

And, yeah. I definitely prefer (all else being equal):

"It's only a block away", she said.

Whether you follow the rule or not, you need to have learned it.

Conversely, punctuation that was part of the quoted source needs to be included in the quotes.

The reason there’s room for argument is because there’s no simple rule that adequately covers all scenarios.

I'd also never put punctuation inside of "sarcastic quotes". It feels wrong.

I still will change the ones on the right to the left ones if I paste something in and it has them. I think it's trauma from the days of early HTML coding and not wanting to do all the extra coding for each right and left mark.

Well that's obviously true.

People writing English insist the rule on the sentence makes no sense and is different from the one on code.

If you ask me, I'd suggest we use the code rule in writing too, and make sure to copy punctuation from the original, just to make that people angry.