This article helped defined the “data engineer” role so I’d say it belongs here!
Although some time has passed, I find it very relevant: SQL is used more than ever, graphical ETL tools that don’t output code are rare and vendors are still trying to convince executives to trust all their data to proprietary data warehouses.
The author Maxime Beauchemin also wrote Airflow and Superset so they have some experience worth listening to.
That seems like a good idea by removing ambiguity about what the necessary skills are.
When joining a new company, I once asked a wise colleague “are you a data engineer or a backend engineer?”. They replied “I’m a software engineer” and ever since I have given the same answer, for reasons similar to your post.
I have also seen “data engineer” used at facebook to indicate someone who writes SQL but not other programming languages, another potential reason not to use this as a job title IMO.