Software engineering is whatever definition that allows me to procrastinate and sleep at night knowing I don’t need to learn more.

If you don't want to learn you chose the wrong profession.

To expand, the software industry moves fast, and you have to keep learning to stay afloat, or risk stagnating and ending your career early. look at where software was at 5 or 10 or even 20 years ago. There was no react and no rust 20 years ago, nor was there even git! Whatever you know now is going to be out of date in a matter of years. good luck getting a job if that's all you ever want to learn.

Conversely, 10 years ago we also had Grunt, Gulp, etc, which were poor implementations of build systems we had ~40 years ago.

It’s not all progress.

Stagnating yes, but not ending career early. There will be python/java/c/c++ jobs for decades just keeping the lights on for non-tech companies.

Say that to people in this thread.