[bztzt]

there is a separate, smaller "quality" team with a separate reporting hierarchy that is supposed to address this - that's where the reference to data scientists, etc. in the article comes from.

basically the idea is to split the SDET role into two - SE testing (closer to the code than SDETs used to be) and "quality" (further from the code than SDETs used to be). SDET testing, though not directly driven by the code structure, tended to be at a pretty low level driven by a detailed functional spec.