das gud stuff. man... this game is embedded into my core and nature by now. it just transports me to other times. i cant really describe it with words.
there are different flavors of DS, there are people who are doing diffusion models, doing top stuff that may or may not yield anything, but they are doing it because they know math well and enough code to put new maths stuff into new products. deep knowledge. so called ML engineers. maybe they are even good at coding at the lowest level, but in their point of view, why? these people are at huge companies that have vast resources downstream, they make people like OP work their work actually..
there is T shaped folks (unicorns, everybody wants one even if politically not ready [most arent]), where they know some concepts of many topics, perhaps so called full stack DS, which i consider myself to be... and i wouldn't be able to read thru most scientific papers, but I can put stuff together from start to finish including deploying it as an API that's scalable to top performance because of cloud. i do go back to basics often and I think its only natural! i think its like being a pilot, why not check the basics that actually, if forgotten, will take everything down lol... and you will use that the most as well!
i think also many people who are too much into one thing, math, code, whatever it is, start to call non basic things that are basic to them, well --- basic... BUT THERE IS NOTHING BASIC about multi linear reg and how to set it up all proper and how humanity spent thousands of years getting to this point..
there is also DS thats like data analyst on steroids, knowing middle basic and middle tier algos and stats well and can deliver mad value with a bit of business knowledge. hell, they could even use excel for their stuff, but proper understanding of the question at hand will most likely allow you to downgrade to lower, simpler tools. and simple is awesome! people often misinterpret complicated for advanced, not the case whatsoever.
once you know the land you accept your weak points and strong points and points you need to know enough to put stuff together. at the end if you know how to make sure stuff works and it works, hey, it works. and the only thing at that point between messing around and science, is "writing it down"... ;) push that code up , make it reproducible end to end.