Personally I would probably draw the circle of software engineers fairly tightly and acknowledge that the rest of us are programmers, or developers, or software architects, or plumbers.
I'd certainly exclude someone like myself from the magic circle of software engineer. My career started accidentally in economic and environmental modeling (ah GAMS, my psycho ex, how I miss you), currently involves creating addons for Blender, went through a brief CRUD app phase back when Facebook was young (shudder) and has involved random trips into data science at various points. I'd also exclude virtually everyone I've ever worked with if I'm honest because most of what I've worked on has either been bespoke and artisanal and so was been software crafting, or it's essentially been plumbing together systems designed by real software engineers and then prettying up the resultant monster. Despite that I've had the title software engineer a few times, as have lots of my colleagues.
I'm not sure that the author is right in saying that it is easier for programmers to transform into software engineers than tradesmen into real engineers. I definitely think that in both cases some seriously heavy training and a lot of unlearning needs to be done.