This is an interesting distinction, but it ignores the reasons software engineers do that.

First, hardware engineers are dealing with the same laws of physics every time. Materials have known properties etc.

Software: there are few laws of physics (mostly performance and asymptotic complexity). Most software isnt anywhere near those boundaries so you get to pretend they dont exist. If you get to invent your own physics each time, yeah the process is going to look very different.

For most generations of hardware, you’re correct, but not all. For example, high-k was invented to mitigate tunneling. Sometimes, as geometries shrink, the physics involved does change.