Genuine question, I am not an engineer nor in any sort of role that could plausibly be considered engineering.
Building a house takes engineering (e.g. structural). It also takes carpenters and plumbers and so on. What’s fun about software is you get to do all of it on one project.
Words mean things, and if we want to consider "software engineer" as anything more than title inflation, it should mean more than just a programmer who's full of themselves.
If I shit out a webapp that's crashes if you look at it funny, that shouldn't be considered software engineering because it's a pile of shit that barely works.
If I make a webapp that actually gives useful error messages to users and is robust in the face of failure and is maintainable and someone else would want to touch my code, then we're starting to get somewhere.
Let's be honest, the main reason so many people glom on to the term "engineer" is because (as others have mentioned) the rigorous processes around licensing for other engineering disciplines keeps supply low, which attaches an inherent market value to the term. People then adopt the term without justification in the hope if nets them a pay raise. We ought to accept that it's OK not to be an engineer. Other professions are also valuable. It's also important to "gatekeep" meanings of words to a certain extent lest we think it wise to accept a language in which any word can mean anything.
No seriously that kind of gate keeping is just ridiculous.