Hardware engineers are absolutely necessary. However, they make tools, not solutions. No question, their tools are incredibly complex, and their job is import

Hardware engineers are absolutely necessary. However, they make tools, not solutions. No question, their tools are incredibly complex, and their job is important. However, it doesn't scale in the way that a software need does. And the thing is, as even absurd but amazing Minecraft examples have shown, software engineers can develop hardware, if inefficiently. True we don't know anything about 5nm lithography or whatever, but that's more a chemistry/physics/manufacturing domain. Finally, even the hardware depends on software. It requires software internally to do its job, and the development of said hardware absolutely depends on software. Chances are, hardware engineers informed software engineers about their need for doing better hardware work, and the software engineers built better software to enable that.