> the whole concept seems to be so far outside of most people's frame of reference

What? Are you living in the same world as me?

Pretty much every industry apart from manual labour or craftsmanship related work uses software. If you work in an office chances you spend most of your time using software.

Then people go home and play on their smartphones which connect to back-end API servers developed by software engineers or stream films of netflix, also developed by software engineers.