I'll chime in with a confirmation that, in my experience, too, an EE who "just routes them" is either not very good, or working in a dysfunctional organization. Performance isn't something that exists in its own bubble, it comes with clock and power requirements and the devices that offer "more" of it than other devices have to compromise on other things. If a company insists on enforcing a strict hardware/software team separation, both teams have to be involved in these decisions, otherwise the results are borderline catastrophic -- boards that can barely be programmed and debugged, or sub-optimal component choice, bad analog chains, difficult clock distribution etc., depending on who is more involved in the decisions.

Just like, past a certain point, it's impossible to do good embedded development on the software side without at least some basic knowledge of EE, there's no way you can come up with a good hardware design if you're completely ignorant about software development. It's no coincidence that the best engineers are the ones who can do both.