The engineer that is part of an association of engineers, working in one practice of engineering that's under a licencing scheme can lose their licence, that doesn't mean that engineering is only that... You're pigeon holing engineering to only the practice performed by licenced professionals, which is not true for the meaning of "engineering" as a whole so I don't agree with your premise a priori.
> We do apply scientific knowledge to practical problems. The discipline isn't there, however, for the vast majority of us. In fact, most companies prefer it that way because proper design creation/validation takes a lot of time
And those companies don't have a mature software engineering process, throughout my 20 years in software I've worked in them (startups usually).
On the other hand I've also worked in a couple of global tech companies that do apply software engineering practices, that do designing and RFCs to gather data and feedback about the proposals. That do apply processes for software design and architecture to maintain those systems healthy through a 5+ years timespan, etc.
Other companies don't need or want the heavyweight all of this processes carry, and they might be right in doing so if their systems won't cause major pain for a large swath of the society, they can tinker with their systems and play around, I agree that it isn't hard engineering but... Is it needed for these cases? Does everything built with software need all these practices or can these practices be used by the professionals and companies that require them?
> Calling what most of us do "engineering" cheapens the meaning of the word
Let's agree then that larger orgs do some kind of software engineering at least, a lot of smaller companies are still in the tinkering phase and that is completely fine.