If I had to guess, it was the Illuminati (since they clearly own all the SaaS vendors) that brought us the Semantic Layer, but we will find won’t we?

It's interesting how this is both a nebulous yet concrete idea and how definitions and implementations vary widely. I was having the _exact_ same questions since I've had to newly lean more into the data engineering space at my current gig, so it's helpful to hear these takeaways from folks experienced in the trenches (not just the newbs).