Problem/Motivation
The generate-theme command puts quotes around the 'base theme' YAML key in the generated theme's info.yml file, because it has spaces in it:
'base theme': stable9
Steps to reproduce
Do
$ php core/scripts/drupal generate-theme my_theme
and inspect the generated code.
Proposed resolution
AFAIK from my work on Module Builder, this is caused by Symfony's YAML dumper component.