Causality will be tough here. I could also credit the certification regulations just as much. And truth to tell, construction techniques are vital, yet we don't value the construction workers in this way.

That is, it is a whole system. And largely comes to costs and known building techniques. After all, certified engineers built "galloping gerdy."

(And I didn't even get into maintenance costs and application. )

Construction techniques are vital, but a civil engineer is employed to conduct the correct QA/QC on those techniques.

This doesn't devalue the effort of the work crew, but it does recognize you need accredited professionals at certain parts of the process to ensure public safety.

To be a bit more pointed: causality isn't difficult here. This legislation and professional practice was deliberately designed as a result of the numerous failures observed throughout the 1900s. The cause: multiple fatalities and unreliable infrastructure let to the regulation of the engineering profession. The effect: we are safer.

My point is that it is all of the regulation involved. Not just the single line worker that is the civil engineer. I know more than a few of those folks, and they are not some magical being. And it is more than the civil engineer. It is also the auditor. The inspector. Even the manager making sure they are all working together.

That's survivorship bias. The ones that didn't collapse are still there. You don't know about the ones that did collapse because they aren't there to see.

You have quite a dim view of humanity if you believe the only reason a bridge stays up or boat floats is due to engineers being anointed and threatened by some entity.

It's true that lives hang in the balance in those forms of engineering, but there are a lot of forms of engineering that are low-stakes, like mechanical engineering of HVAC systems in an office, or audio engineering of a musical recording, where the stakes are not far off from that of writing software, or materials engineering of new stretch fabrics.

Whenever this question of engineering comes up it's always bridges, airplanes, and so on, but that's such a tiny percentage of engineering. Things don't have to be high-stakes to be engineering.