[yowlingcat]

> Reliable, versioned data access APIs address both of those families of problems.

They only address it in so far as they push it downstream to the analyst, who as you mentioned, "is likely not better versed in what means what than the developers who work on the application databases."

There's a reason why datalakes exist, and having used them at past N companies, I think this is why data engineering of the BI flavor becomes necessary at the point that reporting becomes critical. An API is strictly worse than a datalake, and it's not hard to set up and maintain the latter. API versioning and communication are for frontend integrations, paid partner integrations and potentially (although I'd probably lean more on gRPC and the ilk) microservice to microservice interactions. But, I like to avoid building unnecessary API surface when I can.