Text copied out of Word, a PDF or a web page carries hidden formatting, non-breaking spaces, curly quotes and characters you cannot see. This strips them out and hands back plain text. Every fix is a separate switch, because what counts as clean depends on where the text is going.
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It takes text that came from somewhere else and gives you back text that behaves. Non-breaking spaces become ordinary spaces. Zero-width characters and byte order marks are removed. Curly quotes are straightened. Runs of spaces collapse, trailing spaces go, and stacked blank lines reduce to one.
Because “clean” is not one thing. Text going into a JavaScript trigger has to have straight quotes or it will not run. Text going into a printed job aid reads better with curly ones. Dashes are a house style decision rather than a fault, so replacing them is off until you ask for it. A single button would have to guess, and it would guess wrong about half the time.
A subject matter expert sends a Word document and you are about to paste six hundred words of it into an authoring tool. Or a block of copy from a PDF arrives with a hard return at the end of every line. Or something looks fine on screen and refuses to behave once it is in the course.
It does not change your words, only the characters around them. It cannot know whether a particular non-breaking space was deliberate, and occasionally one is, so read the result rather than trusting it blindly on anything with unusual formatting.