We could just stop calling it an engineering discipline. You've laid out plenty of reasons why it is nothing like an engineering discipline in most contexts where people write software.

Real software engineering does exist. It does so precisely in places where you can't risk trying it and seeing it fail, like control systems for things which could kill someone if they failed.

People get offended when you claim most software engineering isn't engineering. I am pretty certain I would quickly get bored if I was actually an engineer. Most real world non-software engineers don't even really get to build anything, they're just there to check designs/implementations for potential future problems.

Maybe there are also people in the software world who _do_ want to do real engineering and they are offended because of that. Who knows.