I agree the terminology is sometimes used in this sense. Though if there is a bigger engineering effort it's often because the engineers are attempting to go b

I agree the terminology is sometimes used in this sense. Though if there is a bigger engineering effort it's often because the engineers are attempting to go beyond the requirements. I.e. the requirements may be satisfied with SQLlite on a raspberry Pi but the engineer builds a large distributed system that runs in the Cloud. This could just be because they have no idea what they're doing, or it could be because they're intentionally building something beyond what is asked. It's definitely possible to build more complicated systems that just barely satisfy the same requirement that a simpler system would satisfy. I'm tempted to call this "bad engineering" rather than "over engineering".