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None of the roles listed in the edit can be done well, or at all, by people who don't have even a basic grasp of the industry they're working in.
Actual economics professor here… Take as much econometrics as you can possibly stomach. Augment it with classes from the stat department but econometrics will teach you about making causal inferences in situations where experiments are impossible, unethical, or extremely expensive (or all of the above). Modern empirical economics is 99% about making causal inferences. That’s basically the only thing we care about. Me…
To add to this, I do not have a phd in econ, but did what you recommended and work as a data scientist with PhD economists. If you do this, you will make just as much as they do.