Part of this is the huge ZIRP-driven salary bubble in the US. If good software engineers were as cheap as good structural engineers, you'd be able to stick three of them in a room for $500k a year and add a part-time manager and they'd churn out line-of-business software for some weird little niche that saves 50 skilled-employee-years per year and costs $20k a seat.

The bubble means that a) the salaries are higher, b) the total addressable market has to justify those salaries, c) everyone cargo cults the success stories, and so d) the best practices are all based on the idea that you're going to hyperscale and therefore need a bazillion microservices hooked up to multiple distributed databases that either use atomic clocks or are only eventually consistent, distributed queues and logs for everything, four separate UIs that work on web/iOS/android/desktop, an entire hadoop cluster, some kind of k8s/mesos/ECS abomination, etc.

The rest of the world, and apparently even the rest of the US, has engineering that looks a little more like this, but it's still influenced by hyperscaler best practices.