It's actually become somewhat hilarious to me. Like you said, the data science label is being applied quite liberally (no judgment, I'm not the world's authority on how it should be applied), so here you have companies paying $100k or more to have people do Excel work or Tableau visualizations.

"Data scientist" is the new "business analyst".

I think data science moved into the hole where analysis used to be.

This. You are exactly right. I work for a startup not in anyway related to Data Science or ML etc. We use Python here. My flatmates work for a big named DataScience company and most of the time its numpy and a bit of data visualisation.Pandas and Numpy to the rescue. I am like dude, I can do that in blink.

In an engineering class, when dealing with a problem about factories that produce widgets and consume resources/widgets from other machines, I made a complex Excel spreadsheet that was animated to pass little numbers around that represented the items produced or consumed.

It didn't actually give correct results, I'm not sure it could have worked (I needed to do two updates on the same cycle and never did figure out how), and I documented that it was buggy.

But it looked cool and I got good marks. So my experience pretty much agrees with yours.

Where can I get a job like that? I'd be happy to take it at this point.

Data engineering as well.

Haha, so much yes.