Why is there a sudden craze of programmers with little math background jumping onto machine learning which requires a much different skill set than traditional programming?

Money.

Money, since employers don’t know what to expect, it doesn’t matter immediately that candidates don’t know what they are doing.

Money, since successful, useful, profitable ML results depend on data, which is expensive and difficult to obtain saves money.

Money, research, and ML always have secondary gains, even if they don’t result in a technical advance; marketing and sales may benefit from the AI (tm) or LLM label. Marketing can always use a white paper or research publication to amp up its “expert” designation.