Seems like they have enough resources to train their translation NN and speech-to-text NN. I don't think google has introduced those features for the users in the first place but they were a means to get training data.
If they really think their NN is good enough to replace community contributed captions, I have yet to see evidence of this, and there’s no evidence in the announcement that this is a vote of confidence in their tech. If anything, it’s a vote against their ability to manage spam and abuse, they just don’t want to deal with it anymore.
It’s not like companies like Google have never had technical regressions either. Their core service, Google Search, is less useful to me than it was 10 years ago.
but the tl;dr amounts to just because a company has the technology does not mean it is broadly applied across all of its services where it would be most useful. That said, if YouTube ever implements automated CC that works I’ll happily scarf down that humble pie.