[apohn]

I've worked with a lot of Business Analysts and they usually end up fighting over p-values and R-squares, even when the linear models they are creating are total garbage due to overfitting and multicollinearity.

I agree with you that easier to use and ubiquitous data prep+ML will eliminate a certain type of data science role. However, most good data scientists I know work on taking a business problem from no/bad/inappropriate data to the right data to address the use case. It's not just about data manipulation and ML.