Why is this an issue?

Octal escape sequences in string literals have been deprecated since ECMAScript 5 and should not be used in modern JavaScript code.

Many developers may not have experience with this format and may confuse it with the decimal notation.

let message = "Copyright \251"; // Noncompliant

The better way to insert special characters is to use Unicode or hexadecimal escape sequences.

let message1 = "Copyright \u00A9";  // unicode
let message2 = "Copyright \xA9";    // hexadecimal

Resources

Documentation