If any of the above are more convenient than paying an engineer you aren’t any safer, the enterprise paying is just putting money in someone else’s pocket.

From my perspective what I always loved about "the profession" was a relative LACK of gatekeeping. I loved offensive security for the same reason, there was a long run where you really just needed to be able to hack, and if you could demonstrate that there was a job for you somewhere (for better or worse).

Keeping the industry in its current form frozen in amber would be as weird as, I don't know, keeping horses & carriages in business by regulating scarcity of motor vehicle licenses. Not a great analogy but hopefully you see what I mean.

Pretty big assumption.