Yup, between analytics engineers and ML engineers, it seems data scientists are the weird middle we no longer need.

I have worked with "data scientists" that are more rebranded statisticians. Some are overpaid SASS users, but some are true statistical wizards who can also program (R/Python/SQL), and when you need them they're great. I don't need them to write production code. I'd rather call them statisticians but I'm glad to see them getting paid better!