New lawyers, doctors, and CPAs have to demonstrate textbook mastery to pass a handful of exams once in their career. Engineers are expected to demonstrate textbook mastery for every job they apply to _for their entire career_ (and often multiple times per application!)
everyone you mentioned here has some kind of an ongoing public tally going on - Yelp/Google reviews, customer referrals that lead to new business or lack thereof. If I'm looking at a crappy lawyer or accountant, they probably have a 2* average of public reviews and/or out of business because noone wants to refer to them. Is there an equivalent of that for a mid-career programmer?
> EMTs need to get an EMS license/certification
I love EMTs. I was one. I'm a paramedic. I train new EMTs. But the EMT course is 160 hours, and is designed and tested to be passable as a high school junior. Let's not use that as a comparison.
Most of these positions also have zero to minimal continuing education requirements which often, let's be real, are trivial. Quick online courses that can be busted out in a couple of hours, or "go to this hotel in a nice location, spend a couple of days, and go to the conference room off the lobby for a couple of hours in the morning".
Software engineering? You have people saying here - with a straight face - "Yeah, a 3-4 hour take home exam at every company you interview at is entirely reasonable" for the rest of your professional life.
There's really some truth to the licensing thing. In some ways, I'd really like our field to adopt certifications so we can skip the BS of interviews. I got the leetcode certification, let's talk design or something relevant please.