Escaping depends entirely on the context in which you are using the functions. What is safe for displaying inside <h1> tags, is not necessarily safe to display for the value attribute of an input field, and even that wouldn’t necessarily be safe as a href attribute value….
In short – perform the sanitisation yourself as you output it. Though in the case of the_title () or get_the_title (), esc_html is not necessary, since WordPress applies the following functions:
Note: the_title prints the title – so esc_html ( the_title () ) won’t work. Similarly, the_content prints the content (in any case, you’d expect the content to display HTML).