Anime

I would also like anime to be as faithful as possible, but there are examples of anime with translations that are intentionally maliciously changed. Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid being the low hanging fruit here with the infamous "patriarchy" line. People are finding more distasteful changes in other anime localized by Jamie Marchi (and others).

If you mean an example of something like a joke that may not translate properly, puns are commonly the cause of necessitating such changes. But in the case of a joke regarding specific geography, I cannot think of one, but I mention something so specific because there may be a show that has it, and in that case IMO the context of the scene should be taken into consideration, as well as the original author's intent. If the author wants someone to laugh there, then it would be on the localizer to make sure that scene is funny in the target language. If the joke goes over the heads of its viewers because its something they couldn't understand I would say its important to defer to the author's intent of that scene being funny, while ensuring the potential replacement is as analogous or similar in the target language as possible. So a similar joke that is more generic or understandable would be better IMO than a direct 1:1 translation. Of course, this is an edge case and not common, but still a potential.

If i was on my pc atm i could pull up an article with way to many examples, but one off the top of my head is a recent remake of a romcom has a localizer literally saying the show sucked and they fixed it. Can't think of the name atm. I know a boys love manga called I Think I Turned my Childhood Friend Into A Girl (or something like that) turned a character trans, kinda ruining the point of yaoi. Mushoku tensei apparently got a lot of censorship.

Here's an article of bad English localizations in games and anime, https://nichegamer.com/8-years-awful-localizations-games-anime

Of course it's possible it solves nothing. As I said, localizers will not be completely eliminated. There will still be a necessity for them to correct poor grammar and other such things that a translator usually does not do. Really a localizer is basically supposed to be just a slightly more advanced proofreader. And lately many of them have been overstepping their bounds. I just think introduction of LLM and MTL in the process can maybe be more accurate because it hopefully won't be injecting things where its not originally present.

I doubt Crunchy/Funi are behind the changes because they have also approved accurate translations as well. If it was company mandated then ALL of their localizations would be wildly inaccurate, which is not the case. I think its really just negligence and them just signing off on basically anything.

MTL and LLMs have advanced pretty quickly recently and even MTL from sites like DeepL can be surprisingly accurate with nuance in some sentences, being much more contextually knowledgable than other MTLs like Google Translate. I think if not now then in a few years the accuracy will increase.