Most ML jobs are sitting around scrubbing data. The fun math part is like 5% of the job, and usually there's some guy (or a small handful of guys) that's a PhD who is hired to do all of that because he was in the research area before he left academia.

I could be wrong, but this is my experience.

Agreed. We call that team "operations research" and they are all PhDs. The ML devs build the pipelines and deal with engineering concerns around having/moving/securing lots of data.

That too. So how is all computer science not 'web dev' and not a viable career choice? Assuming we are talking about the "right" kind of web dev, I guess.

I think there's a general misuse of terms like AI, Machine Learning, Data science and Data engineer. ML is the new "Big Data"