But this is just a tacit admission that a lot of jobs need the credential.

And it's a slippery slope. Should, for instance, a chemist have the credential? It's easy to say, "No". Until you get another Bhopal.

Basically you would start getting more and more fields demanding credentials for liability purposes over time. Some would be entirely justified, like chemist and biologist. Some would be tenuous in the extreme, like c# or javascript monkey.

There are absolutely jobs that require credentials and for good reasons that I fully support. I'm not talking about these jobs. It's the ones that require a credential, but the job duties do not involve the skillsets associated with that credential. An easy way to spot these is if the requirement is something like a 'bachelors degree'. Doesn't matter what field, you just have to have gone to university. This is BS requirement.