You could say the same thing about software engineering. The vast majority of it is simply assembling components that already exist. I've worked on dozens if no

You could say the same thing about software engineering. The vast majority of it is simply assembling components that already exist. I've worked on dozens if not hundreds of web apps, and most of it is just gluing stuff together. Often it's done on autopilot (or literally automated code generation). I've also worked on a lot of code that was original and challenging. Systems work is the same thing. Most of the time you're just assembling existing components, but the overall design of the system is absolutely engineering.