Well, I imagine theres a continuum of experiences and definition differences across the industry. Similar to how "product manager" is different at each place. What I saw back in the early 2000s or so was that the SRE and the word "engineer" in general used to be handed out sparingly. An "SRE" was a sysad/devops who had the ability to commit code to fix a product instead of just opening a bug and waking an engineer. An "engineer" committed compiled code, not short scripts. But then eveyone and their cousin became "sre" whether they deserved it or not, and everyone got an "engineer" title. I've seen manual QA folks who were unironically called "engineers". QA is dead now and QE is barely hanging on, and SRE seems to be dying too. Not sure whats next, maybe just overpriced cloud gui tools and thats the end of it. And SRE can go be high school comp sci teachers. And SWE can wake up and fix their own bugs and hate their lives.