> important stuff, that a lot of people rely on, and for which there will be severe consequences if it is built wrong.

Sure, if you're working on medical devices or software controllers for devices in vehicles or nuclear reactors or whatever, but, as a fraction of the software industry, that's tiny. I don't have hard numbers on this, but you can look at popularity of programming languages as a proxy. Most software "engineers" do JavaScript or Python, two languages you would never ever use for such things.

Most software is a form of entertainment with a small amount of usefulness sprinkled in, or doing things that could, in principle, be done with paperwork.