2019: A controversy erupts due to a particular case of a troll basically adding spammy, graphic translations on big YouTubers' videos. Said Big YouTubers complain and YouTube begins restricting the feature to make the process of publishing submissions increasingly difficult. (Previously other viewers could give approval through consensus and YouTube changed this to require manual action from all uploaders, severely lowering the rate of published captions)
See https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1167565334917742593 for further context.
2020: YouTube decides to kill the feature for good (by September 28), in the process they will be deleting all unpublished drafts. Seeing as this decision was more so motivated on reputation than functionality, it didn't take long for projects such as http://youtubexternalcc.netlify.app/ to emerge, which will continue to offer the feature externally.
Our project is to try and grab these drafts in hopes of passing them along. There are people who rely on them as a function. No particular person would go looking for a specific translation of a certain video, but the ability to have human-written captions instead of an automatic translation is something people continue to look for. So here we are trying to rescue submissions YouTube deemed weren't worth assessing properly.