One of the reasons engineers exist is to mitigate a high cost of getting something wrong. That's different to saying "people could die" ... it can be as mundane

One of the reasons engineers exist is to mitigate a high cost of getting something wrong. That's different to saying "people could die" ... it can be as mundane as, once we've made a million of these widgets there's a very high cost to remake them all because something was miscalculated. When software work heavily incorporates these elements of process and planning, I call it engineering. When it doesn't (for example, when it's built entirely agile style with literally no planning ahead beyond what we do for the next 2 weeks) I don't.