I think I'm "most" engineers and I haven't ever worked on something that was "just" a CRUD app. Having a DB behind your web app doesn't make it "just" a CRUD.
It's really overestimated how many simple apps exist.
Regular SaaS products of different kinds, cloud software, hosting software, etc. Really representative of most of the Web-enabled software out there.
For every one of them there has been an almost negligible amount of CRUD code, the meat of every one of those apps was very specific business logic. Some were also heavy on the frontend with equal amount of complexity on the backend. As a senior/staff level engineer you also have dive into other things like platform enablement, internal tooling, background jobs and data wrangling, distributed architectures, etc. which are even farther from CRUD.
Not to call you out but this is exactly what I meant when I said software engineers have egos that will not let them accept that they are not designing critical stuff.
Comparing your cloud based CRUD app to a missile is a perfect illustration. There is no dishonor in admitting that our stuff isn't going to kill anyone if there is a bug. Don't write bad code, but also sometimes just getting something out the door is much better than perfect quality (bird in the hand and all that).
Not to call you out either but it seems you have really no idea what a basic CRUD app is. Which is fine, I guess not everyone likes to reads the base definitions of these things. It's clear I replied to the wrong person as we don't have a shared understanding of complexity.