To be frank, after 40 years of programming in one form or another, this whole "Software engineering" thing -- to me -- reeks of marketspeak doubletalk used to put buns in seats at lectures/conferences, make career educators feel relevant, and to let hucksters continue to peddle the same books they've been recycling since the 1990's with a new cover and title on them.
It is a meaningless "soft language" phrase designed to fill out marketing blurbs, introducing zero new concepts, methodologies, or approaches to development that we haven't supposed to have been doing for at least two decades. Whilst the ethical practices of engineering and treating it as engineering should be an essential part of the process, this whole nonsense of a "new wave" of it in front-end development is just taking an existing name, and slapping it in not for improvement, but as a marketing blurb.
Particularly on the web technologies front, since pretty much it's what we're supposed to have been doing since somewhere around the time HTML 4 Strict became viable, aka when we stopped caring about Netscape 4.x or IE 5.0x.
... and the only reason any of the concepts, methodologies, or approaches of this so called "software engineering" can seem like something new to people -- again at least in terms of using web tech -- is the simple fact they never stopped building HTML, CSS, and JavaScript using the outdated, outmoded, 1997 style HTML 3.2 approach of presentational markup, with zero graceful degradation, separation of concerns, semantics, or any other meaningful metric of good practices. See how popular all the garbage frameworks are for proof positive of that.
A situation only further exacerbated by the folks throwing "JavaScript for nothing" at everything, telling users with accessibility needs to sod off and overcomplicating the simplest of tasks.
Sick buzzwords and euphemisms do not substance make.
... and that's the true tell of it, as the ACTUAL engineering concepts of accountability and professionalism are nowhere to be found in what people are now calling "software engineering".
But you should at least learn the jingoistic jargon, since you can bet clients galore are going to start using it in their routine business meetings where they sit around playing BS Bingo.
Even if underneath all the lofty words and new names slapped onto things, nothing has actually changed in terms of getting the job done. End of the day you still end up having to put up with clients who think they can learn about the latest technologies in the pages of Forbes.
Which is akin to taking financial advice from Popular Mechanics. Before you know it you've been scammed by con men like Paul Moller.