Machine translation was horrible and completely unreliable before LLMs. And human translators are very expensive and slow in comparison.

LLM is for translation as computers were for calculating. Sure, you could do without them before. They used to have entire buildings with office workers whose job it was to compute.

Google translate worked great long before LLMs.

I disagree. It worked passably and was better than no translation. The depth, correctness, and nuance is much better with LLMs.

The only reason to think that is not knowing when Google switched to using LLMs. The radical change is well documented.

LLMs are not they only "AI"

It really didn't. There were many languages which it couldn't handle at all, just making completely garbled output. It wasn't possible to use Google Translate professionally.

I don't think you understand how off that statement is. It's also pretty ignorant considering Google Translate barely worked at all for many languages. So no, it didn't work great and even for the best possible language pair Google Translate is not in the same ballpark.

Not really long before, although I suppose it's relative. Google translate was pretty garbage until around 2016-2017 and then it started really improving