From knowing many different types of engineers, not only does software engineering fall pretty neatly within that group of jobs but also software is an integral part of their engineering practices. I know some people who are designing planes and if software isn't an engineering discipline I guess I need to tell them they recently became not engineers (though maybe because they occasionally use physics equations the author would say they still are. It's a silly distinction). The argument seems mostly based on their personal definition of engineering, which doesn't seem useful to me (a quick reading of a dictionary would make it seem that software engineering false very neatly within definition 2b https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/engineering)

Overall though I found this post incredibly hard to read. It's incredibly long and wordy though that's par for the course for these petty semantic arguments.

Engineers use software and inevitably some will improve the software as they use it. I’d draw a distinction between engineering using software, and engineering the software itself, though. It becomes a bit blurry—I’d say using the Matlab command line is not necessarily software engineering, it’s using a tool for engineering that happens to be made of software. But you can also write your own Matlab code, so if we want to say there’s software engineering I guess there’s no reason it couldn’t be done in that environment.

IMO, I’ve never been all that concerned as to whether the “engineer” label should apply to me (coming from an engineering education but mostly looking at software). It’s more about having a professional obligation than any great feats of skill anyway, and since an obligation is mostly just felt in your head, you can give it to yourself.