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One incident like this is not a huge problem, but it sets a terrible precedent that could turn Wikipedia into the same sludge as the rest of the internet. Best to nip this kind of thing in the bud.

It also does harm to the communities of smaller Wikipedias:

'a user from the Tumbuka Wikipedia reported that they had initially felt "hope and joy that a small community had then gained another native editor", before finding out that this account had been a promotional sockpuppet.'

Allowing mass machine translation of Wikipedia articles into other languages is a problem, because it floods smaller language wikis with low quality text. If a user wants machine translated pages, they can machine translate them themselves.