why are localizations such a perennial drama subject in anime circles? have people forgotten the art of fansubs? or are they like not an option in modern streaming services
Functionally: No, not really, it is sort of lost. Fansubs are very rare today, they've mostly been out competed by official subs (and automated rips of those official subs). People want to watch the show as soon as possible, and if they have to wait 3 hours for an official sub edit with some fancy typesetting and song translations, most people are gonna skip that. And if you can't keep a fansub group together, you often times lose a lot of that knowledge (translators don't keep in touch or get recruited, the typesetter gets a more intensive job and can't help, your source for tv encodes moves out of the country, etc) and its hard to build that back up from scratch.
