People invent new words to avoid the baggage of old words all the time. Statistics has a lot of old associations and negative connotations, data science sounded fresh.

The Eat Fresh Refresh.

I’ve always felt that “data science” is for people who want to do the job of a statistician but who don’t know what a statistician does haha

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a job listing for a “statistician” outside government roles.

That's quite likely seeing how the term originally designated "the analysis of data about the state" [1].

[1]: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/statistics

The title "data scientist" was massively overloaded over the past decade, so while it might mean "statistician" on one team, it might mean business analyst, visualization designer, data engineer, or a number of other things that are outside the core skillset of a statistician on another team.