Accessing transcripts to power automations seems needlessly difficult?

As a business coach, I have a number of workflows in Notion that I want to fire off the back of a transcript of a coaching call becoming available. It seems the transcript file is only available when the meeting is recorded to the cloud? However, it was only a year or so back when zoom made cloud recording storage way smaller (making management of the files much more difficult) and actively encouraged us to record files locally. I’ve now got a bunch of systems in place based on saving the recording files in dropbox, but now that the VTT isn’t saved there… it seems I’m supposed to manually download the transcript from the “My Notes” section of the Zoom app? Why can’t I access that transcript through an API?

I’m a reasonably capable Zapier user and the only solution I’ve made work is cloud recording, but that upsets a whole variety of other systems and I can’t really work out why Zoom is making it difficult to access a transcript, or encouraging us to use cloud recordings when they so recently encouraged us not to.

Am I missing anything or is this the design?