So I firmly believe that using shell expansion in your scripts is a horrid idea no matter what the syntax. But while you're thinking about backticks and ruby:
Much like a modern POSIX shell you can also use the more ergonomic %x (e.g. %x{echo true} %x(echo false).
Backticks will perform string interpolation before execution just like a normal double quoted string.
Backticks are simply a method, so you can redefine that on any object.
I'm reasonably sure you don't "embed a shell command in backquotes" all the time in Python (and I don't think this is pedantry; the specific ease of this syntax was the claimed benefit, not just the ability to shell out in some way).
Backticks were an alias of `repr` in Python 2.x:
$ python2.7
Python 2.7.6 (default, Nov 13 2018, 12:45:42)
[GCC 4.8.4] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> foo="this is foo"
>>> `foo`
"'this is foo'"
And it went away in 3:
$ python3
Python 3.11.3 (main, Apr 5 2023, 15:52:25) [GCC 12.2.1 20230201] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> `ls`
File "<stdin>", line 1
`ls`
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax