A lot of “data engineers” are former db analysts and such that don’t know much of anything technically outside of SQL and even that might be something they only are “certified” to know rather than actually good at.

It’s basically becoming a title I’d associate with being low-skill. I used to be a “software engineer in data” and never call myself a data engineer because people would think I don’t know how to write/maintain production services, just write ETL pipelines