I also remember the hostility of my informal universities IT chat groups. Newbs were rather insulted for not knowing basic stuff, instead of helping them. A truly confident person does not feel the need to do that. (and it was amazing having a couple of those persons writing very helpful responses in the middle of all the insulting garbage)

I don't think that's entirely true, what I usually see is people that think AI art is just as good as many artists.

You can be impressed by something and still think a machine can do it just as well. People that can do complex mental arithmetic are impressive, even if that skill is mostly obsolete by calculators.

Cost, safety, interaction between subsystems (developed by different engineering disciplines), tolerances, supply chain, manufacturing, reliability, the laws of physics, possibly chemistry and environmental interactions, regulatory, investor forgiveness, etc.

Traditional engineering also doesn't have the option of throwing arbitrary levels of complexity at a problem, which means working within tight constraints.

I'm not an engineer myself, but a scientist working for a company that makes measurement equipment. It wouldn't be fair for me to say that any engineering discipline is more challenging, since I'm in none of them. I've observed engineering projects for roughly 3 decades.