Sure it helps to have established bodies to hold engineers accountable and report violations to, but I certainly don't think the ethics training is a significant factor. There's no shortage of degreed engineers signing off on things far more ethically questionable than most of what big tech is doing.

This also sounds pretty optimistic as a generalisation: > people refuse to sign off on work they don't understand or aren't confident in

Instead you’d claim that the key distinction is that engineering requires a legal/moral duty to accountability.

Is that a general consensus here?

I doubt it'll ever get adopted in the software industry, because we have many competent people doing good work without a software engineering degree, and degrees of low enough quality employers do whiteboard coding tests at interview, so there's not really a notion of a 'properly qualified' programmer.