You're literally the first person I've ever seen suggesting this, I actually thought you were being sarcastic!

My POV (and most people's, I think) is that software is buggier because software people are wildly unserious compared to hardware people (and other engineering disciplines like civil engineering). Which is an alright trade-off in the very large majority of cases, as software is rarely very important and is easy to update, whereas hardware and bridges are very high-stake and extremely costly to update.

> if you ask a civil engineer to design you a perfect bridge, they probably will. Ask a software engineer with all the experience and education in the world to build you a perfect podcasting app, it simply isn’t happening

The civil engineer gets to rely on extremely high-quality very-serious civil engineering work, built over millenia. The software engineer relies on shaky (ie buggy) work from past nowhere-as-serious software engineering work, built over ~70y.

The fact that the software engineer can do anything at all on such small and buggy past work shows how easy it is compared to civil engineering.

In my mind, saying "software engineering is shown to be harder by the presence of bugs" is akin to saying "LEGO building is harder, people build stuff that collapses all the time"