Machine Translation Service, Variations are on the way out

We will be removing the user interface entry point for Machine Translation Services from SharePoint Online, beginning September 2018.

With this change, your organization will no longer be able to perform manual, on demand translation service activities in SharePoint Online. This change will affect your user's ability to create new variation labels in order to schedule translation activities or workflows. The update will not affect your user's ability to leverage Multilingual User Interface (MUI) capabilities in SharePoint Online or its related APIs. Also, it will not impact any previously created variation labels or the ability to schedule translation activities or workflows based on previously created variation labels. After this change is made, your users will not be able to create new variation labels.

This sounds the death knell for machine translation of Variations, and probably Variations itself.  Already, modern sites like Communication sites and Team sites cannot use Variations, and the Machine Translation API does not work on modern pages.  When this announcement says "your users will not be able to create new variation labels", it is referring to classic sites.