People who whining about MTL, probably forgot about good ol days when you had to fuck around with Translator tools like chiitrans or translation aggregator. You would get same result as MTL but you also need to put some effort to get it. And don’t get me started on games with aditional interfaces like in megrim games, which is another lair of pain to deal with.
That's only for people with smol brain. For us people with big brain, we just fap to CG rip and play other properly translated games instead.
Well, joke aside. While i use tools like ITH+TA, i never use the MTL feature of them. Instead i use the furigana feature to help read it in japanese, especially the kanji. If you have watched a lot of (subbed) anime you should have a lot of the words down and hiragana and katakana can be easily remembered playing this way, or with a bit of study if you want to learn it faster. This way you can improve you japanese to be better than "lol i have watched thousands of animes subbed" while playing a game and not corrupting your english (especially if you're ESL) by reading whatever shit the MTL shit out.
So, no. I never experienced this "good old MTL days" you were talking about. My good old JP game days are pretty much playing with a physical JP to EN dictionary book in my hand.