The weird thing is: Software devs kinda like to have it both ways.
When you ask them how critical the things are they are doing, they like to (as you phrased it) think of themselves as skilled code surgeons who precisely cut away solutions to life or death problems.
When you suggest to them stricter rules, guarantuees, checks and laws like you have them in civil engineering or electrical engineering they look at you in horror: "What, you mean I can't just carelessly try out a new framework on a project?"
Programming to me is a multiplier profession. Unless you code for yourself privately, your code is going to impact other people, organisations and the environment we all live in. This can be a good thing because by making the right choice we can really shave off collective years of the useless stuff humanity does. But we can of course do the polar opposite as well: waste everybodies time, leak private medical data, create algorithms that feed violent racist content to kids, make mistakes that endanger whole industries etc.
Simple preventable things like uninitialized variables still caused the dirty pipe vulnerability in the Linux kernel in 2020. The only thing that tends to give me a little hope is the traction Rust seems to be getting — at least we can stop doing the totally obvious and preventable mistakes and move on to unpredictable and unpreventable ones?