Data science, unfortunately, is often considered a buzzword because it varies so significantly from org to org, and often there's a lot of No True Scotsman arguments resulting from that which makes everyone unhappy. But at minimum, every data scientist needs to know SQL; there's no way around it.

I wrote a full blog post ranting about the disparity between expectation vs. reality for data scientists a year ago: https://minimaxir.com/2018/10/data-science-protips/