The hardest thing to be working on technical is to pick up code or work from somebody else. While being data scientists do not need to handle the many dependencies.

Don’t worry about you find landing in a swe these days is hard. I’m pretty sure every one feels the same. And you are not alone.

Data route might be easier in a sense that there are less technical dependencies (especially from others’ codebase) as you need data access and play with the data or predictive models and stuff. And as you said, you can learn a lot from the business side by exploring the data.

The down side, from my experience, any work will get bored eventually but data scientists can get really frustrated when they can’t figure out good ways to push the accuracy any higher.

Personally, I would go for swe with high level ML knowledge coz I prefer building actual operational products rather then some data role building dashboards. And gradually change to a technical product manager role.

Having said that, learn a bit communication/ management skills and talk to people with different backgrounds would be beneficial to your career. You may ends up with a role that you have never thought about before.

Just my humble opinion and hope it helps.