It's a job you grow into by not working at the job.: Agreed! There are quite a few paths which makes it easy to grow into, such as analyst or data/software engineer. There is however a mismatch of expectation that you can just start as a data-scientist out of school, which represent a steep learning curve and that people are usually not ready for.

Oh we disagree entirely. I am openly mocking the idea that you should learn the job by not doing it. That data scientists are just oh so special that no one can be a junior at it.

It's ridiculous. If you can't mentor someone at the job, then that speaks to your failures. It's not the job that's the problem.

You can have junior position for everything, so long as you revise your expectations.

A lot of firm, rebrand analysts jobs to be junior data-scientists position to essentially attract candidates, so yeah you can be "junior" at it, but it's essentially a different job.