well, i have no evidence of this. however. looking at the way auto-generated subtitles are served at youtube right now, they are sent individually word-by-word from the server, pick up filler words like "uh", and sometimes pause for several seconds in the middle of sentences. and they're not sent by websocket, which means they go through multiple requests over the course of a video. more requests means the server works harder because it can't just stream the text like it does the video, and the only reason they'd do that other than incompetence (which would surely have been corrected by now, it's been like this for years) is if the web backend has to wait for the next word to be generated.

i would love to actually know what's going on if anyone has any insight.