Because software development isnt an engineering task.
Engineers are good at building bridges, and artists are good at making paintings. That doesnt mean it is a good idea to have the engineers paint paintings.
It might help to learn a little more about Engineering.
Leaving aside the four splits, Civil, Mechanical, Electrical, and Electronic with the obvious corollary that few Engineers build bridges, I'm reminded of my first student Engineering project back in 1983 (ish).
Building a sheep shearing robot - hardware and software, with no pre existing libraries of control software, etc.
A great chunk of software was written by Peter Kovesi .. a mechanical engineer still working on computer vision projects today: https://peterkovesi.com/projects/
You sound more than a little ignorant of the breadth and depth of talent in the world and more than a little inclined to believe that people can be boxed up and ring fenced by your particular world view.
No sheep were harmed in the making of this robot. Sheep literally fell asleep when secured.
Nobody reasonable is saying that software isn't important, technical, or valuable. It isnt a dig.
It just has to do with the subject matter and definition of Engineer. The clearest delineation is that an Engineers work is the application the laws of physics. Software developers are more akin to Scientists than Engineers. They work in the arrangement of logic and the semantic relation of abstractions.
That is to say, Engineers work within a framework of rules, and Computer scientists construct frameworks of rules.
The definitions you just came up with are completely arbitrary. Worst yet, your definitions aren't even shared.
It's hard to pin down exact agreed upon definitions in English, but I searched many popular dictionaries and none of them have "Engineers work is the application the laws of physics".
Fair enough if you want to have personal definitions of words, but don't try to gaslight the rest of us into thinking your understanding is the canonical one.
Here's my facetious definition to illustrate how dumb the discussion - I think an engineer is a person who works with ENGINES (duh it's in the name). Obviously people who build bridges aren't engineers; do bridges have engines?
I brought up a definition shared by many people, and did so without hostility. Do you have a real definition that you can bring to the table? Is there a reason why you are taking things personally?
Can you articulate the difference between an engineer and a scientist?
That’s the point. It’s not software developer’s fault that things are the way they are. Anyone with strict engineering discipline or whatever is welcome to create software the right way.
I learned ForTran whilst studying Civ Eng. back in '89 - '91 . Notice the two digit year - you software lot gave us the Y2K snag 8) It seems rather silly these days when terabytes are trivially available but when every bit, byte and nybble costed rather a lot, it nearly made sense.
If software techies/engineers wish to push back, may I suggest: Tay bridge, Tacoma Narrows, Millennium bridge and concrete cancer. Comet commercial jet airliners and the many snags that lead to fillets and rounded corners on ships int al. Do we count Titanic as "user error" or inappropriate expectations exceeded?
Building as practiced by hardware engineers is not linear in number of unique components. Building as practiced by software engineers is, at a terrible price.
Engineers are good at building bridges, and artists are good at making paintings. That doesnt mean it is a good idea to have the engineers paint paintings.