I can actually tell you a bit about my (little) experience with AI translation.
A friend is slowly working on his own
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for over a year now and I sometimes help with the testing. It started as a script to do some quick but accurate translations, due to some of the quirks you mention with Translator++ and the likes. Packing lines together for example. It's very useful in some games, with lots of text, less for others.
It's what I used when I did a MTL for sugoroku2 but it wasn't intended for such a huge game at the time, it was painful.
Anyway, we are both experimenting with AI translation quite a bit lately.
Him in particular batch translated the four main Exs-tia games (I think the total was around 110~120k strings) using gemini (you get actually a ton of free usages on some of those models, he spent 0$). It took him more time to replay the game to play test than to translate.
Speed gain aside, I can tell you it does help tremendously with consistency (even if it can still get the pronouns wrong at times if it doesn't understand who is speaking).
However, you still get a lot of the 'poetry' you mention. Not to mention the onomatopeia and japanese sound effect (doki doki and the like) where it can have a lot of troubles translating it into something meaningful. Maybe that is fixable with better prompting.
I should add the AI can be quite good at translating script lines without messing them up, so this one is also a plus.
To sum it up, AI is a very useful tool but not a magic solution.
But, again, I'm still kinda new tinkering with it.
