"Software Engineer" is just a job title.
> Engineering requires licensing and exams through a governing body.
"Software Engineering" doesn't, it's just a job title.
> Can’t have the prestige of the title without the responsibility.
There is no real-world prestige associated with having "Software Engineer" as a job title (as opposed to "Software Developer").
> Software developers want to have their cake and eat it too (power and respect with no oversight and governance).
"Power and respect" is not actually something that is commonly associated with a guy sitting at a desk for a salary.
> Pile on the regulation (GDPR for starts, more PII protection to follow up, extremely painful fine for failures).
You just learned that Facebook stored passwords in plaintext for years and nothing bad happened. In fact, it's hard to conceive that anything particularly disastrous could have happened. Yet, you call for more regulation that will drive up costs for everything. Whole industries could become unprofitable and those high-paid "Software Engineers" would become redundant.
I have the opposite opinion: The fact that computer security is generally poor teaches people how to properly use computers. They need to assume that there are no secrets, because that is the plain reality. No amount of regulation will make computers secure. No certification or best-practice encryption scheme will prevent users from writing their password on post-it notes, or from opening "sexy.jpg.exe", or from answering that call from the "Microsoft Service Center".