I guessed as much, between work and agenda pushing, there's something clearly more important between the two for them...

The nineties translations weren't as bad as this honestly.

You have Ragnacenty's US version being translated by someone offended by the religious undertones of the game (an uncensored version by Sega's European division exists) and despite that personal bias clearly interfering with their work, it's clear they had some moral obligation to produce an accurate translation, even the actual changes were more to make "problematic" plot elements implicit, not entirely gut the implication out and produce a new story.
NoA localizers were willing to defy company policies to produce accurate translations for Terranigma (yes that was NoA staff, even though NoE published it) and Earthbound among others. Ted Woosley had short deadlines of like 1 month and he was still willing to sacrifice some of that time to faithfully translate some elements that NoA's QA would reject.
Even Working Designs, were making localizations like some of the Neptunia ones: the actual JP dialog is translated, and some hit-and-miss flourish (like shitty political jokes) was put around it. They messed with game balance more than a few times but at least the Lunar games are mostly intact (a shame this work ethos didn't carry to their recent efforts like SN5, something like an unsupervised 8-4 on drugs would make)

Now, "localization" companies openly reject accuracy to the Japanese text.

A case could be made for localization adjustments improving the game - like Sony switching O/X buttons, Translating W- as Double- rather than kept as is, fixing Engrish like Shine Get, maybe some liberties for pun and reference translations as long as the intent is kept and not entirely removed (like Harvest Moon FoMT's cursed anagrams removed from the translation), spicing some dialogs like Koopas in M&L2 speaking leet language instead of cheap katakana/all caps like in JP version...

And besides these adjustements, Japanese needs to be reworded according to context (if it isn't, the end result is something like Breath of Fire 2, a literal translation from Japanese and a good one at being just that, censorship aside).

However, some localizers with agendas and/or deep despise for the medium, openly throw as many offensive labels on the original work and developers, want the games as mediums to the mainstream for their shitty writing and ideals having often little to do with the game proper, and deem that doing an accurate translation is something bad, and worthy of scorn and hate (you can already see some bitter neogaf dwellers rejected from some fantranslation circles and angry at projects like FF Fates and Bravely Default translation mods existing purely motivated by an anti-censorship mindset, they are already pushing heavily that fan-translations are automatically worse than official translations and shouldn't exist even without one because they're laughable weaboo stuff and bad, not because copyright issues)