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.