My experience is somewhat limited professionally in software (just under a decade), but with very few exceptions I've seen little in terms of genuine professionalism as it pertains to anything that could be called "engineering."

Most design/implementation decisions were basically (or literally) equivalent to "we use Kubernetes cause we've already got a lot of existing Terrraform for it", or "we have React developers." I know real professionalism and maybe even "engineering" practice exists somewhere (I mean it has to, for something rigorously proven, right?), but I've not personally experienced it; I've seen this everywhere, as a consultant and employee, both in the public and private sector.

The number of times I've been on meetings or similar where there's tradeoffs backed by quantifiable data was a handful, at best, so the AI trend makes perfect sense to me.

I really don't imagine with something like Boeing where there's a far higher burden of proof there's discussions around, like, some equivalent subjective thingy like "code smells" or "anti-patterns."