That's true, but at some point it's no longer engineering. To practice engineering in my jurisdiction, it's required that you hold a professional license and work for a company with a permit to practice.
I am a professional software engineer (P.Eng.), but many employers for non-critical software do not have a permit to practice. They have no need for it.
I need to file my Continuing Professional Development hours every year. One category of hours is just "practicing engineering". However, if I am working for a company that does not have a permit to practice, it would be quite a problem if I claimed I was practicing engineering.
Practically speaking, that means software engineering is just the development of software which could be dangerous (at least where I live). It's distinguished from general software development mostly by the need for rigour.
I should also note that anyone can assist an engineer, so it's not like Computer Scientists are cut out of the field. Many disciplines have technicians and other specialists who are just as technically capable as the engineers in their domain (often more so).
The lead engineer signs off of on releases, and they're the main person held responsible if there's a safety incident traced back to sloppy work. That was the only real difference between the engineers and non-engineers I worked with. It basically just meant, "the buck stops here."
There are different degrees of software engineering. If you work for a company that makes pacemakers, there are very strict software testing requirements. The same goes for the developers of real time avionics systems for air craft, ECUs for cars and autonomous train systems in places like Singapore or London.
If you're writing software that tracks inventory and ships out shoes, mistakes aren't life threatening and you might have faster processes to get things into production. If you reuse that software for shipping out medical equipment for people with diabetes or sleep apnea, you could run into life treating problems if the testing process is not updated to match the seriousness of the problem you're trying to solve.