In my country there used to be some 5 years (realistically 6 for most students) Computer Engineering programs that were basically electronic engineering with selected classes from computer science tackled on top of it.
And as Electronic Engineering programs used to have a lot of classes from Civil Engineering tackled upon it, legally said Computer Engineers were legally licensed to build small 3 floor buildings.
People who have not studied and been given that distinction in engineering going on to call themselves engineers is the reason the term is overloaded.
I've always assumed there's a near 100% overlap between people using the term wrongly to describe any programming activity, and people complaining that it has no meaning or is self-aggrandisement
How does certification work? I’d imagine it would be in a less abstracted language like C or C++. The problem for me is most of my schooling was based on web technologies and 2 classes of Java.
I wound hate having to studying for a C based test when the area I work in is all web tech. Same could be said of Java. I learned it in school and haven’t used it in 10 years except for it being the backend on my first front end dev project.