The obnoxious pro-engineering equivalent of your statement is to say that engineers are more intelligent because they are held accountable to a higher standard

The obnoxious pro-engineering equivalent of your statement is to say that engineers are more intelligent because they are held accountable to a higher standard of objective truth, one that is judged through the cold eyes of physics and math rather than the rosy glasses of a strategically cultivated in-group. It's probably wrong to directly compare these two types of specialization. However, we do have an interesting social experiment going on: China's bureaucracy leans towards engineering backgrounds while the USA bureaucracy leans towards legal backgrounds. You can see this in the strategies pursued by each side: China pulls large and small levers to acquire hard power (in the sense of manufacturing capacity, not just guns) while the USA has historically been better at pulling large and small levers to acquire soft power (and even though tension from the Triffin Dilemma is peaking again, that's still probably a fair assessment). The next decade will probably see a showdown that supports or repudiates the "engineer primacy" vs "lawyer primacy" narratives on the level of international strategy, even though both will obviously still exist and have primacy within their respective niches. Interesting times.