You seem to make extremely light of "doing original research" here. A PhD or equivalent is absolutely required to do serious research in the field. Sure, you can always get the depth of knowledge required without a formal program, but the reality is that few do. Most people just take Machine Learning 101 then think they are a domain expert.

That said, there is definitely a place for non-PhD level ML practitioners. I don't think the industry has stabilized in this regard, but I can definitely see a "machine learning developer" type position becoming quite common. This is not the same as someone doing original research, but would definitely meet the needs of a great many business use cases.