Do other careers have such a vast gap between the platonic ideal and the actual lived experience? The way most people talk about software engineering, you'd think they were some kind of open-source warrior building entire applications from scratch when really they're on the Cancel Prime Membership Button Obfuscation Enablement team at Amazon.

I think people like to role-play doing the job before it was professionalized because then it sounds less like you're a cog in a machine.

That's called binning but it's not as bad as it seems and it reduces waste. The way chips are manufactured all the high end and lower end variants come from the same process, but the company can only guarantee the performance of the higher binned ones.