It's very strange to pretend that a certain class of people involved in designing software are the "real professionals", and the rest are just plumbers.
Calling a group just plumbers is to me condescending: it's a trade that requires creative thinking, knowledge, experience, and a willingness to (literally) deal with other people's sewage. Plumbers are the real MVP. But the same is fairly said for other professions and trades (excepting that, one hopes, the sewage is figurative). There is a difference between those who are self-taught or taught on the job versus those educated in academia, and there are many situations when it's useful or important to be able to distinguish between the two groups. The difference in training doesn't speak to the quality of work, but it does speak to expected capabilities.
Software gets built automatically these days. I make a design in a high-level language and click "Build" in my IDE, and that's the construction step. It can be repeated as many times as needed -- changing a line of code and rebuilding is the equivalent of tearing down a cathedral and reconstructing it from scratch just to change the position of one stone. In the world of bits, that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
Some 50-60 years ago, there used to be professions of actual "software construction workers": punch card operators, magnetic core memory weavers... But those jobs were automated away.
If I copy&paste a line of PHP, it's certainly not a great feat of design. But it's still design, just as dropping in a wall element in AutoCAD is design rather than actual construction.