I agree with how you characterized it and the term “ai engineer” didn’t resonate with me as defined by the author. If such an engineer doesn’t need to know about the data involved (“nor do they know the difference between a Data Lake or Data Warehouse”) then I don’t think they will be able to ship an AI/ML product based on data.

New titles can be helpful for sorting out different roles with some shared skillsets such as the distinction which emerged between Data Scientist and ML Engineer at some companies to focus the latter on shipping production software using ML.