And has less cultural cachet.

I disagree. From what I've seen, the lower level you go, the more advanced it is seen by other developers. As the copypasta goes:

At the beginning, there was Purusha. From his face, born was the Brahmin, the priestly caste, the tooling creator, one who develops programming languages, compilers and standard libraries.

From the arms of the Purusha, Kshatriya, the warrior caste, was born. Kshatriya is the developer of systems software; operating systems, database engines, graphics drivers and high performance networked servers.

Then comes the Vaishya, the merchant caste, the Application developer, who was born from the knees of Purusha. From the feet of Purusha, the fourth varnā, Shudrā, the system administrator, was born. Shudrā serves the above three Varnās, his works range from administrating computers in bureaucratic organizations to replying to support requests.

that's by other developers, but I think in the mainstream know nothing culture people have an image of "coding" that's more prestigious and hackery than EE?

I don't know a single person outside the tech bubble who sees "coding" as something prestigious

Well yes, that's why China's in the lead. We willingfully gave it up because corporate decided it was too expensive to pay american talent. They started the death spiral towards "No American wants to work in EE anymore".