Lots of engineering disciplines enjoy complexity. It is challenging, and doing challenging things feels like an accomplishment, or demonstration of skill. I think software gets away with higher levels of complexity than I typically see in other engineer disciplines because it has a lower negative impact from the perspective of the business or the end customer. In auto manufacturing, for instance, complexity not only increases r&d costs, it also increases performance unit costs, and typically reduces reliability and maintenance costs (both of which are usually visible to end users). In software, complexity may appear to reduce r&d costs by reusing code in suboptimal ways, but the end effect is marginal slower, marginally higher binary size, and higher maintenance costs, but the end user doesn’t really ever see the direct maintenance cost, just a subscription price or support contract.

Imagine reusing an entire physical assembly for only one of its functions (eg a microwave to get a clock) this is the sort of thing we do in software all the time, but would immediately fall apart in other disciplines.

We can't see software.

You can see if a motherboard has twice the necessary components, or if a robot arm just looks wrong, but if your algorithm to process 1000 records takes a thousand times longer than it should (but still finishes in 100 milliseconds) no one notices.