I tend to agree with you in principle, but for me too, a lot of high-level features are better understood in term of translations. Objects, coroutine, closures...

Even in formal CS, it's common to define the semantics of a language by translation, which can give more hindsight than operational semantics.

Now that I think of it, I think the problem is that most languages are defined informally which can be imprecise and inadequate.

The translation provided by the compiler is the closest thing we have to a formal semantics, it's natural to rely on it.