The work is fun, but the best part was making new friends and working a craft to create mastery over time which could be then shared freely with others, empowering them as they make their own modifications. Feeling like you'd made a contribution and seeing the human fruits of that labour.
You can't build a community when one person with Codex does all the work and dumps it in a GitHub repo. That's not mastery or purpose or community, that's automation. Few people do this hobby so they can pump out git repos of games probably less than 1000 people care about anymore.
I'm not alone in this, the retro game translation community absolutely HATE machine translations. Translation patches made by LLMs are usually a separate category or not allowed at all, depending on site.