I don't doubt that a number of students who could have chosen among a number of STEM fields did in fact go the software route because it was lucrative. But these are going to be smart people - not Javascript-only code monkeys that the speaker is implying.
There's a spectrum of engineers that I have worked with.
Some are very, very technical, more like the civil engineers the speaker talks about. They care very deeply about optimizing for performance, care about clean API. And, sure, there are engineers on the other end of the spectrum that are more focused on completing a task with perhaps a more pragmatic (?) focus.
Perhaps it's a good thing the industry has both kinds.
(Myself, I was closer to the latter example above — while I could intuit the efficiency of an algorithm, I never did take the college course that covered n^2, etc.)