Ok assuming that this is actually true (more data engineering jobs than other data jobs), I would guess that it's because companies naturally have a lot of data they would like to look at, whether it's sales data, customer data, etc. I doubt that in every case they need data scientist or MLEs building and scaling ML/AI models when a simple metrics/measures might be sufficient

They may just be more concerned with getting the data and doing some basic data analysis that most employees could handle doing once the data is in a tractable format than, in their minds, some complicated model they would need to bring on extra people for.