Was there a tradeoff involved there? Is there content that is not in the Netflix catalog today because of the costs of closed-captioning the rest of the catalog?

If that is the case, are Netflix's customers better or worse off, individually and collectively? Is society better or worse off? (I don't have a clear answer, and I'm not sure there's an objectively clear answer, but I do think that there are tradeoffs in these discussions that are sometimes hidden/ignored.)

I am not aware of any content that got ditched because of this. I imagine only a Netflix admin type person from back then would know something like this.

They only have to provide it, if it originally had captions. They didn't have to caption stuff that never had captions to begin with, but they went ahead and captioned everything, pretty much, and if you look at their new self-created shows, they are typically multi-lingual(multiple voiced languages) and multi-captioned (multiple written languages).

I would say, it forced them to deal with becoming a global provider and not US/English centric like they were, which I think we can say has been good to their business overall :)