I'm a bit confused: Isn't the whole point of these shim templates to make translation easier? Aren't they at least supposed to be more suitable for use for Content Translation?

A more general task that proposes marking of meta-categories of templates: T165053: Add a way to denote different desired behaviors for different types of templates

Perhaps ideas recently brought up by @ssastry and @cscott can also be somewhat relevant, e.g. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsing/Notes/Wikitext_2.0/Typed_Templates

The real solution, of course, is something along these lines: T121470: Central Global Repository for Templates, Lua modules, and Gadgets. Yes, it's big, complicated, and far-fetched, but it's much-needed.

Tried to open a discussion at Wikidata about linking of the templates, d:Wikidata:Project chat#Templates used for substing

The shim templates will not translate anything unless they are substed, and without TemplateData they fail badly. Usually CT just calls the same template and carry over the link, with an error message as result.

An example is this edit where a previous translation has failed. At nowiki the template w:no:Template:Cite news is a shim. The actual template that should be used is w:no:Template:Kilde avis. The shim has no TemplateData and should not be used.

Yes, the ultimate solution is T121470: Central Global Repository for Templates, Lua modules, and Gadgets, but right now I'm more inclined to figure out how to solve the problem and to avoid fixing translations manually. ;)