I think the "monkey" term applies more to the actuarial side of things.

Agreed - though I apply 'monkey' just as much to 'data analyst' / 'business intelligence' types.

Programmatic (non-Excel based) approaches RARELY involve the tedious copy-paste nonsense that spreadsheets do.

Even with setting up functions for it, data munging is still a tedious pain in the ass that boils down to copying said functions and altering them ever so slightly until things come out just right.

Data scientists have solid programming backgrounds (including management), many actuaries do not and often choose the "git-r-done" approach that leads to extremely fucked-up processes.

Good data scientists do - but I've stumbled upon analytics shops that do things in just as fucked up a way because they're filled with B.S. and M.S. statisticians with zero hardcore programming background. I'll give an example from a place I interviewed at - they had a three page long macro involving a few dozen SAS data steps to eliminate identifiable data, and then they complain about it taking forever - a competent programmer can take care of it in one proc step and one data step, and it's obvious that the original macro developer didn't know how to pass an arbitrary number of variables within a SAS macro. At the end of the interview, it was clear that they just wanted to get things done and didn't actually care about mopping up their processes, to where I'm trying to figure out where they get their data and then try to put them out of business with a SaaS model.