I think development is one of the coolest jobs out there. With dev skills, you can do everything from building websites to physics models to game development to data science... I'm not saying all you need is coding, but you can't do most of these things without code!
I'm not 100% sure I would be a software engineer, but I can't imagine myself on a career path that didn't involve writing tons of code.
I have a similar but different viewpoint. Software products can be distributed to a old rural minority in africa and to a rich man in the heart of a city atthe same time. For many applications they can be catered as well, mobile/desktop, zoom in for bad eyesight, etc. You just can't do that with, AFAIK, anything else.
I'm not 100% sure I would be a software engineer, but I can't imagine myself on a career path that didn't involve writing tons of code.