To be fair US companies have built some truly awful tools in this field.

Can anyone remember the name of that awful booking system Oracle sells?

Is there any mythos around US engineering in the way there is about German practicality, efficiency, and reliability?

There is about software engineering yes, a myth that only the US can build great products

Only in your imagination. Many great products made by none US companies are used in the US and deservedly recognized — Redis, Jetbrains’ ones, Erlang, Lua, Scala, nginx, etc.

I've heard it said that the truth behind the myth of German engineering and German efficiency[1] is that Germans are, rather, rule followers.

[1] Example of both: The new Berlin airport

Wasn't the problem with the Berlin airport that they didn't follow the rules, e.g. fire protection?

Fire protection mess ... was a symptom. The root cause was that the local governments (city of Berlin and state of Brandenburg) wanted to split the pie for many small to medium businesses in the region. Noble idea but hard to execute as we found out later... So instead of giving it all to a contractor that actually knows how to build (large) airports they tried to managed it themself. Those people were unexperienced in this size of operation and it went all downhill from there. It's a common theme with big projects: Local administration is unexperienced but tries to do it anyway and they fail or get ripped off every time. What we should have is a federal unit that just does large scale construction/engineering projects.

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that German engineering is something they want.

In automobiles, industrial equipment, electronics, software, etc. you can sense when Germans were involved. I've accepted that it's something I'll never understand, and that they probably feel the same way about American designs. Same planet, different worlds.

In terms of software you are probably right, since we are behind in so many areas and education for jobs about creating software is not the best.

About cars: Do you mean things like the VW scandal? Or do you mean actually shoddy engineering in cars?

I think the reputation for engineering stems from darker times.

Well, considering best german automotive engineering got left behind in early nineties and that for like 20 years already owning a BMW or Mercedes means constant hassle and tons of cash for trivial repairs - yes. German auto engineering just isn't there.

VW scandal is different - it's what you get when you set unreasonable and actually conflicting requirements.

I recently found out it's not SAP native software - rather it's USA based company/product that was acquired by SAP.