You can absolutely be a "software engineer" in the legal sense, just not in the US.

Here in France, the engineer diploma is a regulated thing, and there absolutely are software-centered engineering school who are accredited to deliver it, which is how I got mine.

It's in the "Grandes écoles" cursus, which usually follows a more classical STEM-centric cursus called "classes prépa".

As to whether "Software engineering" is a real thing, well on one hand most of it isn't very process-oriented, on the other hand there are such thing as ISO certification for software security, so it's less the individual which is regulated than it is the project in itself when it matters (like critical data-center, or handling of medical data), so it's not like there aren't any regulatory framework in the software world.