You can get away with starting out with moderate/intermediate level of experience with Python. You don't have to be a full one SWE but with the way things are going, you should know at least one other programming language aside from python.
#How much programming skills you need for ML?
flat cipher
river spear
refreshing your python coding and learning ML frameworks like Pytorch, Transformers, Langchain, DSPy... will go a long way. your ability as a programmer will be significantly better if you learn another language. you can get quite deep with just python though.