I think you hit the nail on the head. In my experience, a lot of the more BI/Analyst work I've done has been far more valuable to the company than the ML work,

I think you hit the nail on the head. In my experience, a lot of the more BI/Analyst work I've done has been far more valuable to the company than the ML work, and most of the value of the ML work actually came from insights gained while doing EDA that had direct business impact and not from the model itself.