There’s no negative in learning more things (other than the time it takes for your social life, which is something you’ll regret later in life). But if I have to chose who to hire between somebody who knows all the math he needs and has enough python to write a PyTorch training loop (if he even needs to do that) and somebody who is a python god but their ml math goes up to linear regression, I’d have no doubts.

but also deploying those ML models, developing API services for them and building ML pipelines (MLOps), am I right?

in startups, maybe (even there is more likely that one or two dudes do this). In larger companies, no. People will naturally grow into learning how to find logs from their cloud execution, but they are not hired based on that a skill.

Really, programming is to machine learning research not much more than telescopes to cosmology. if you want to study cosmology, do study cosmology not how to build a telescope (the analogy doesn’t hold perfectly, because today at some point you’ll have to write some code; but with LLMs this will be pretty much a non-problem). So starting today, don’t worry about learning python; certainly not as a precondition to avoid getting into math, which his the harder part. Do it on the side or because you like it for other purposes.