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(Disclaimer: generalization ahead) That might be because they're starting to get hip to the fact that too many data scientists struggle to produce professional-level code, forcing you to pay a software developer to create the actual deliverable from their prototype. At that point, why not just hire a really bright software engineer who can code well and knows how to work with data?

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I'm not sure it's easy for a software engineer to develop a model, it's quite an orthogonal skill, you need a solid grasp on mathematics and especially statistics.

It's not easy, but there are capable developers that are proficient in data science and it may be cost effective to hire one such (high cost) programmer than one (average cost) data-scientist and another (average cost) programmer.

True, but those software engineers exist, and FAANG and FAANG-adjacent companies offer the work opportunities, prestige and salaries to attract those "twofer" engineers.

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