Good readable historical overview, IMO.

The referenced "The Rise of the Data Engineer" article proved quite prescient.

The present overview seems less good on future predictions (it's hard!). Also, some mention of "data science" could've been a propos – though it's difficult to find consensus on what DS actually entails.

Overall, I think a good framework to navigate this space is to think of 2 overarching disciplines:

1) Engineering: scaling data & software.

2) Science: getting actionable insights from data combined with subject matter/domain expertise

Usually, #1 is a platform for #2 – but getting #1 good seems just as, if not more, important, and is perhaps harder.

EDIT: formatting