I thought that software engineers were supposed to do, you know, engineering - solving hard problems, dealing with uncertainty.

But you might be right, engineering around the difficult LLM primitive might be a task which is just too hard for your typical software engineer, as you said, they want predictability, hand holding, determinism, most are unable to deal with the real world which is not a spherical cow in a vacuum. So I guess they can stick to simple very well understood primitives like EC2 or Postgres and leave dealing with LLMs for others.