It's way worse than what you can get locally via whisper. Not sure why, perhaps Google legally can't use whisper, or can't spare the compute.

Yes. Most videos on Youtube have captions. OpenBrief is basically a wrapper of yt-dlp so it can support other video streaming services and transcribe them if it doesn't have captions. One of my use cases is importing audio recordings. Local transcription model can do many things actually. The title might be over simplified.