Good luck being able to practice engineering if you haven't got a degree! The licensing bodies for professions won't care a fig about your life experience.
I say this as someone who went to a school with highly ranked humanities programs. My business communication class taught me more about communication than any rhetoric/history/media studies class. My high school AP English Language class taught me more about persuasive writing than any writing class in college.
If undergrad humanities programs are to be taken seriously they need to drastically increase their rigor and actually instill skills in their students.
Liberal arts schools are not and never have been vocational training institutions. They are academic in nature.
I went to a school that had top ranked humanities departments across the board. There is zero desire for rigor in any humanities courses or departments. It's a way for people to show up to class and get a degree without effort so they can party all day.
In my experience at a large state school, students could sign up for rigorous humanities courses if they wanted to. (e.g. by avoiding the 'popular' courses in auditorium rooms, etc.). Although it's a bit of a shame that it's not universal, and that the student culture often demands "the easy gen-eds"
At the end of the day, I think this is a cultural problem in some humanities departments. It's not unheard of for some STEM departments to fail 50% of their incoming students. I guess the appetite to hold the same standard in other departments just isn't there?
People who can actually do it have done it for a lab or a business, and then get accredited.
My impression of the engineering degree is that it's basically a certificate in being able to deep dive into... something. Whether that's actual bridges or financial derivatives or trading systems, a degree basically says you haven't given up on some large pile of math-heavy topics, so an employer should bet on you being able to learn their thing. It's also the case that there isn't enough time to learn a whole business, so really it's testing that you stuck with the introductory parts of a wide variety of techie things.
I've worked as an engineering manager for both professional engineers and non-degreed technicians / technologists. My observation (such as it is) is that the degreed engineers had a stronger framework to be able to connect ideas and learn new skills. On the other hand, technologists were able to do tasks just as well as engineers but had trouble generalizing the concepts.
Importantly, the degree (combined with professional guidance) also helps you appreciate the things you don't know. For example, a geotechnical engineer may be perfectly able to assess an abutment or design a blast but they wouldn't certify a dam foundation and would reach out for help in doing so.
It's probably worth sharing that I hated my undergraduate education with a burning passion. I've only recently begun to appreciate it more -- turns out those old farts who did the accreditation might have known a thing or two about what you need to know later in your career.