I’m not sure I follow, though I like the tone. What has data modeling been replaced by?

Not OP, but in a similar boat. My 2 cents:

Well thought, sophisticated ways of modeling data for analytics purposes -using established approaches - are being replaced by just pulling data from the data sources - with barely any change in the source structure - into cloud data platforms.

In the past we used to model layers in a data-warehousing infrastructure each with a purpose and a data modelling methodology. For instance, an operational data store (ODS) layer, integrating data from all the sources, with a normalized data structure. Then a set of datamarts, each of them containing a subset of the ODS content, in a denormalized format, focused each on a specific functional domain.

We had rules, methods to structure data in order to get performant reporting, and a customer orientation.

Coming from this world, it seems like data governance principles are gone, and it feels like some organisations use the modern data stack same way as each analyst would be doing their own Excel files in their own corner, without any safeguards.

By vibe graphing, probably.

Throwing shit at the wall, mostly. "Here's a S3 bucket of line separated .json blobs that have a consistent format sometimes! Good luck!"