This is not true at all, except maybe in very specific places (e.g. some jurisdictions do not allow you to call yourself an engineer without a specific qualification).
Software Engineer and Developer are essentially interchangeable terms and largely a matter of taste.
It may well be different in NL, I’m not going to argue with that. But ‘ontwikkelaar’ is literally a different word in a different language - no surprise that it may have different semantics to the closest word in English!