So, the literal tags seem to have fixed the issue. However, I'm not happy about having to mark up all of my templates, in order to get a website to work. Its one thing to have to use Smarty Tags to mark up templates that change, but completely different to mark up templates that never change.
As far as always having had to use them...
I'm not so sure about that. Here is a site, which was created years ago, and Smarty has never been updated on it. The only things ever updated with this website were the HTML markup to HTML5 compliant markup and the CSS to CSS3 compliant code.
There are no literal tags or any kind of delimiters around the JavaScript on this website, and it works just fine.