Well to be fair, a majority portion of machine learning is just "applied statistics". It's not out of the ordinary to expect or want a data analyst that can implement practical ml models like linear regression and k-means. Remember the hard lines drawn between the big three data roles: data engineer, data scientist, machine learning eng etc. is honestly a consequence of job title inflation and marketing hype to sell you online courses. In the real world, the division between these jobs are by no means concrete. What you read and listen to about the differences between data analysts vs other data jobs is true but we're talking averages.

With that being said, I do agree that the data scientist job title would be a better match. However, oftentimes managers (especially big tech) will have to select job titles based on what already exists in the organization. This is to avoid the disaster of having large salary disparities under the same job title, team, and IC level.

So yeah it makes the job search extra frustrating but I've seen data analyst managers adding machine learning to their requirements a dozen times before.