The real human element that I've observed, having been both in management and as an IC, and more broadly from research I've done as a whole, is that ENG is often the profit driver but has the least amount of say in their own workload.
I think this is where the tension comes from in the lasting, I'm still complaining about 20 years later sorta thing. Once you realize the value you are delivering to the company, naturally, you start to want to have some more say over the value chain, I think this is innante to human behavior, but there is alot of gates between ENG and the rest of the org, most of the time, from what I've observed.
Look at, for example, how "Agile" is implemented at a company. It focuses on ENG having to address stakeholders, without really saying that ENG should be its own stakeholder too. With SCRUM and other systems, the emphasis tends to be on outside stakeholders and what they want, rather than bringing ENG to parity with other stakeholders so everyone has more equal input on the work streams - which ultimately, when this is actually done, prevents more problems than it creates, nearly every time - yet you can feel the resistance in most orgs to giving ENG a full table stake