It does no such thing. People can help all they want. They just don't do it in an interface that Google provides. Instead they edit subtitles and send them to the channel's owner. The owner applies them, in the youtube interface, to their video.

Given the effort of making captions is actually the work of writing the captions themselves the effort went from several hours of work to the same several hours of work +1 minute. Literally nothing of importance changed. And that +1 minute assumes Youtube's UX was best in class because of it wasn't then moving to a better UX could save more time.

The level of animosity toward anything Google does is absurd. If there was a captioning service making money and Google added captions they'd get shade for ruining a market. Now they are removing an arguably rarely used UI but still leaving the feature (captions) completely available. There's literally no harm. The people actually motivated to write captions will barely notice the change. They'll still write them. All they have to do is send them to the channel creator. If the channel creator doesn't want them nothing has changed. They had to approve them before, they have to approve them now except click 1-2 buttons to upload them. Sheesh