The code of ethics for Professional Engineers works even though it isn’t any of the things you say are necessary.
Licensed professions only serve to increase the scarcity of licensed professionals, drive up the price and thereby form an economic cartel. Neither does it prevent any of the aforementioned disasters, nor are the responsible professionals held liable.
"Licensed professionals" is one of those myths in software engineering cycles that won't die. A license won't make anyone competent. It will, however, provide them with an excuse to charge more, do less and ascribe any fuckups to "must be something else wrong, I did everything to board standards"...
The Chernobyl disaster is an operation mistake, which a Professional Engineer may have signed the process for operation, but an operational failure to follow process is not the Professional Engineer's fault. Sure, a professional will try to narrow processes to be as fool-proof as possible, but you can't entirely blame a professional that the planet is capable of generating far more fools than you can plan for.
The Fukushima disaster actually shows Professional Engineering consequences with multiple engineering groups doing analysis and investigations of what went wrong and whether or not to indict Professional Engineers involved in the construction. None of those moved to such indictments, but it was investigated at length. Three of the executives of the company were indicted as a part of those investigations (and then were judged "not guilty" in a Japanese court of law).
"Licensed professionals" is not a myth. A license isn't about making anyone competent, it is about applying consequence when they aren't. It's also about having your back when you are worried about possible consequences. "I can't do that because I would lose my license" is a threat companies have to take seriously. If your company wants to force you to pursue it anyway, you can take the issue to the Ethics Committee at your licensing board/professional organization and they can help you examine the legal, ethical, and moral implications in a way that could result in consequences to your company. If all of that is documented and the company still does it anyway it is easier to get legal consequences applied to company executives, such as real, deserved jail time.
In the Bhopal disaster, seven engineers and executives were convicted of causing death by negligence and give the maximum penalty (which was pretty weak).
The Chernobyl incident led to Anatoly Dyatlov to be jailed and getting a 10-year sentence.
For Fukushima, some people were charged with professional negligence causing death but they beat the charges in court.
Licensing will not make anybody competent. But it can help keep incompetent people out of our field. When Engineers screw up, their malpractice insurance may get too expensive for them to continue to work in the field. When management asks for something unethical, it gives a pretty good reason for pushing back.
The scope would necessarily be narrower and "permit" more unethical behavior but for violations to be enforced by peers it has to survive the eventual "oh you're making a big fuss over nothing, you won't lose your license" problem.
But right now we have nothing. Surely, something is better than nothing. We can't have nothing and already be out of ideas.
More to the point is trying to be an ethical island in an unethical society, You'd have to deal with constant attacks from the "anti-woke" crowd.
You may also find your support tickets everywhere languishing and x months of CAPTCHA-hell on every website.