I think it's the other way around. Compact Language Links gives you a short list of languages that are most likely to interest you, plus an actual, numeric count of the others. For example, https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergen lists nine languages for me and tells me that there are 86 more. I can quickly determine that 9+86=95 (plus the page that I'm on). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergen (where I have CLL turned off) gives me a long list with no count. With CLL, I can tell you that 96 Wikipedias have an article on that subject. Without CLL, I will tell you that the answer is "lots".
If you are translating a page, you've probably been reading in that language, so CLL will put the target language in the short list (not somewhere in the long list of 95 other languages).
Even if it's not in the short list, with CLL, you can search for that language by name and ISO language code just by clicking the button that says "85 more". For example, if you want to know whether that article exists in Finnish, you can find it by searching for fi
(language code), Suomi
(Finnish name) Finnish
(English), ffinneg
(Welsh), fiński
(Polish), or many other languages.
Without CLL, you have to know that the Finnish word for that language is "Suomi", and you have to scan through about 85% of the long list until you find that word (because the fi
language code is alphabetized in the S's). This does not sound like an improvement to me.