Ok. Replace engineering with just a business executive bound by NDA or security clearance into silence and my point still stands: no leetcode, no tests, no certifications, no gods, and people have long winded highly compensated careers and the sky doesn’t fall.
Software engineering is too easily self-taught for certifications to become the norm. The moment you have a cohort of people with demonstrable skills without such certifications, the value of the cert is undermined.