It is revisionist to say that software engineering was never about writing code. It was, in fact, a huge component, and it also wasn't easy. Sure most code is glue but even the glue was tedious and the actual hard and novel parts still aren't really done that well by AI (yet).

It's less about writing code now but we're lying if we try to pretend it was a distraction and not a big part of the real work.

And every claim about what the job actually is or was all along has an implied (for now) at the end of it.