For crappy ones doing commodity work, this is true. For good software engineers, not so much.

I'm a data scientist by pedigree (before it was called that) who's spent the past few years in "regular old" software engineering (and probably heading back in the DS direction). Trust me that software engineering done right is as subtle and talent-intensive as DS.

The problem is that SWE's are terrible at marketing themselves as a group and generally get too little respect and autonomy to have architectural successes.