The fact that you say at the very beginning of your concluding section, “Data pipelines are software,” but later in that very same paragraph state, “data is fundamentally different from software,” shows that your argument is not tenable and is riddled with contradictions at its core.

This article is like saying an oncologist is a doctor, but a pediatrician is not because their areas of practice are different. Of course their areas of practice are different, but they’re still doctors i.e. they practice medicine!

Similarly, while they may specialize in different areas, data engineers and “traditional soft engineers” nevertheless fundamentally do the same thing: they write code. And as a result, they are governed by the same fundamental laws of software engineering.