This is not true at all. There are entire, large sections of the industry devoted to creating safety-critical software. These areas of the industry are well disciplined and highly regulated. This software is designed in such a way to make collateral damage impossible in all but the most exceptional scenarios. This popular silly web programming stuff is truly only the tip of the software engineering iceberg.
No, it's completely true. There are relatively tiny, quite niche sections of the industry devoted to creating safety-critical software in a systematic, engineered manner. I've been part of it. My company has more people writing Java/Cobol business apps than all of NASA has writing true high-reliability code. Even then, while folks writing mission critical code might be 'disciplined', there is no equivalent of the NSPE regulating what someone needs to know to do this, no universally agreed upon standards for what constitutes "safety-critical" or even consensus metrics for how to assess whether something is or not. There are literally hundreds of different guidelines for "how to engineer safe software", but no canonical guide. Even stuff like "can you use C to write software 'in such a way to make collateral damage impossible in all but the most exceptional scenarios'" is a matter of furious debate; some say yes, some say no.
Not just that, but in PE land, the Engineer of Record is PERSONALLY liable for what they stamp, and no corporation can really stand in the way and protect them from that liability.
The automotive industry has standards that govern the systematic development of safety-critical systems (hardware and software). The most significant is probably ISO 26262, which defines an “Automotive Safety Integrity Level” and methods for ensuring the safety and reliability of components at a given integrity level. There are also standards like MISRA C, which are basically defined code quality and software development guidelines to reduce bugs in critical software.
So...exactly my point? Each niche has it's own idea of what the standard is.