What is the logic behind adding machine translation for content that already had a seemingly robust, enthusiastic, and motivated (volunteer?) community maintaining the translations? The "saves money" rationale to deploy LLM/MT automation doesn't make sense when its volunteers are contributing because they want to. This is kind of community and participation destruction wrought by the introduction of LLMs/MT has a serious impact because it undermines the people who are actually willing to do the work. It was presumably costing nothing (or very little) to have the community maintain this content, but the change has cost a significant amount of goodwill. If the Japanese SUMO community wanted to use MT, it should be their sole decision, baring any issues with their stewardship in general. This is someone else saying "look, with this great new automation, you don't need to spend time anymore doing «thing you want to do»". Huh? How does that make any sense to force on anyone?

Mozilla has long suffered from FAANG-envy. If big tech is doing Social Network|Mobile OS|AI, then by golly, Mozilla reflexively has to spend Firefox money on a poorly executed, me-too copy that's discarded when the next fad comes around. The sad thing is the reasoning is usually sound, but the execution... Yeesh.

Mozilla is desperately trying to LARP as a tech giant.

I bet it's nothing more than they prefer a machine they can just use and get no lip, rather than have to deal with humans they have to treat like humans and ask nicely and meet half way on countless issues and pretend to care about etc.

There's probably a bunch of untranslated or badly translated content worldwide, so this was rolled out to help with that, without realizing it would overwrite higher-quality translation.

It probably made a lot of sense in certain contexts, and certain side effects weren't predicted, or it just has bugs that need fixing.

Presumably nothing malicious or stupid. But just ironing out the kinks.

Mozilla has invested heavily in this technology, and whatever project manager is running it needs more checkboxes in the results column of their next request for a raise. In other words, "business alignment."