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
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'.