i saw on twitter a screenshot (i forgot to save it, sorry) of an interview by localizers admitting that they've completely scraped the Japanese dialogue of entire scenes and completely changed entire story scenes before.
That's how bad it is. We need to look at Japanese games over the last decade or so and retranslate all of them i think
The dub of the anime The Devil is a Part-Timer had a reference to Super Size Me in the first episode.
To my shock, it was also in the Japanese audio track...and the original light novel.
References to American stuff like that is so cool when it's actually part of the story and so bad when it's being invented by a nasty freak.
Yeah, I rolled my eyes at this too, until I learned that was also in the source material.
Doesn't change what they did with the second season's dub, which IS cringe. They put in a Spongebob joke, among many other things...
References to American media in Japanese media aren't rare. There's a reason Katawa Shoujo, a loving western parody of eastern visual novels, had a character just wearing Bush/Cheney For President T-shirts... Long after his presidency, both in development and in-universe. They like random Americanisms.
But those are their references to make, not the localizers'.