Welp, I missed the whole thing.
Why do I miss sophisticated talks all the time? I was just playing Tarkov for the first time.
It's good to see that you guys had a nice dialogue. I believe that there's a whole lot of lack of professionalism from a lot of these localizers regardless fo their "biases", because "bias" or not, there are rules to translations and memes, current events and fotm jokes are just always going to be dated, so that's why we should always strive to have the original TRANSLATED and not LOCALIZED unless it's necessary (and from all of these cases we've brought up, I have yet to find a single "necessary" case), because no matter what, players will always notice this cultural dissonance.
I believe that most of these games don't even have a "global audience", of course, there will always be the "new guy to anime", but I have this doubt they're a majority and that, in general, they wouldn't want not to learn about a different culture. Like with the current trends, anime is very popular. Right now it's ridiculous to think people would not notice these titles aren't made in the west and that they might have something they'll "learn" during the game.
Also, this mentality that "most" don't have any problem with current affairs is very fucking weird, to be fair.
Why would you expect them to be when they don't know? Varish.Angout is obscure, OAG was obscure and vilified, GG was vilified (and wasn't really obscure), nobody knows about these changes.
I'm sure we're unaware of many horrible things around the world and we live our life in ignorance, but that doesn't mean they're suddenly OK just because nobody is protesting them.
It's obvious that if I secretly put poison into a family member's food over a long period of time and he dies, he would never suspect me, I did it covertly, I'm a person he or she trusts (like most would trust translators/localizers/publishers not to fuck their product up, unlike us that have some knowledge of their misdeeds) but it's still a horrible deed what I did even if I'm not jailed for it because there's no suspicion of a criminal act anyway.
And being "nice" to "localizers" never worked. Actually, being nice to people that wouldn't want to waste more time and/or have to show integrity over their already worked hours is stupid in the first place. Let's be clear, I'm one of the people that would defend themselves when I knew I did something wrong if I can attenuate the consequences, because "work" simply isn't worth it most of the times, and we're talking "contractor" work here as well with translators.
Having to go back on your work and dealing with drama is just so fucking annoying anyway, so that's why you should ALWAYS raise a stink, because people are generally unapologetic and would rather twist the situation to have an easy time.
Some examples here are even worse than just "twisting the situation to have an easy time", some of them are outright people hating on their work and doing everything in their power to undermine it either for vendettas ("hurr durr, I hate the writing, why is my time wasted") or because they think they can do better ("hurr durr, why high school characters, I'll just change them to university lol because I like it more!").
So I'd say that it's false to think this is "isolated to just some localizers", because we've basically had problems with most mainstream Japanese releases in the west until now.