and yet, the collective industry has still continued to expand for decades because people overwhelmingly cannot consistently do these tasks without their code collapsing on itself.

imagine if people regularly had tires fall off on their way home from the mechanic. or regularly having to get bones rebroken to set them correctly.

I can agree that much of the work is not true "engineering" but most of what I've seen produced over the years is closer to fraud than anything else.