Data Scientists have become the “HTML programmers” of the tech bubble.
My advice: take a pay cut and pivot to becoming a business analyst or something.
For the last 10 years, every data team I've been adjacent to has had a near infinite budget, hired more people than the rest of the company combined, had an abundance of "scientists" for whom any sort of data process, version control, scientific method, or cost controls were never part of the equation. It really doesn't surprise me that companies have decided they're not throwing good money after bad.
There's absolutely good work to be done in Data, but it requires people who know what they're doing, and not just "here's 10 years of postgresql databases. I dunno, find us 10% profit somewhere in it". There's not many companies that really have the data or personnel to make it happen.
In reality, of course, there probably just isn’t that much money at play so the high-budget approach is unlikely to break even, and more critically it’s unlikely that people are prepared to change how the organization makes decisions. I’ve known some people who worked for places where they had data showing solid improvements but it either hit politics or was simply small enough that their executives didn’t want to go with it because it wasn’t the magnitude they’d promised to justify the data science program.
It's a field that's just been over-hired because it's been a field where you can go "we're 2 years away from something big" for 10 years and the money was cheap enough to just keep paying people with questionable results or prospects. It doesn't shock me at all that people are having a lot of trouble getting work in the field. Even 8 years ago, going to college job fairs, I almost had to herd away Masters students in ML and Data Science who were already having a hard time getting a job and were resorting to applying for QA positions at web dev companies.
It's like having the local police department check on the local police department.