I'm a hiring manager who shares this view. I see three distinct but overlapping skillsets with creating machine learning - as they mention in the article: data engineering, data science, ML engineering. I would never hire a person who only had one of those skillsets. I prefer all three, but can settle for two depending on the situation.

The trouble you might be having in getting an interview is probably partly to do with your background and likely also that those job postings get A LOT of submissions. Other hiring managers in my department as well as myself have found we get 10x more submissions for DS/ML positions than software dev positions. In general it's a really unrefined and new job skills that anyone and everyone who's taken a coursera course in regression or clustering will apply.