I agree that for a person practicing electronics assembly and repair, soldering is a key skill, never mind what the guy is called.
From previous discussions in this forum it has become clear that when people use the words "electronics engineer" they do not necessarily imply that the person in question would be have a formal degree in electronics. That is OK but the drawback is that you then don't have a well defined set of qualifications either. So everyone is free to come up with their own definition of what constitutes an electronics engineer. That definition may or may not include soldering.
The old joke about an engineer and a salesman goes something like this, that to be good in his job, an engineer is someone who knows a lot about a little, and a salesman knows a little about a lot, until the perfect engineer knows everything about nothing and the perfect salesman, nothing about everything. Now that may be a bad joke but there is a point. The subject of electronics is definitely too big for any single individual to take it all in. If one is a qualified EE in a branch of the discipline with little or nothing to do with assembly and repair, then soldering is a useless skill, unless for hobby but that is another thing. I don't mean to offend but i do get the impression that many of those who see soldering as a necessary skill for an EE, do so from their own definition of what an EE is and fail to realize how wide the discipline is today. At the far reaches of electronics engineering, they may have heard about soldering but couldn't care less. That doesn't disqualify them as EEs, however.
When i studied long ago one part of the program consisted of practical lab work. The qualification task was to design and build a functional processor controlled EKG (electrocardiography) instrument and demonstrate the working device. That certainly involved a lot of soldering and other practical work. But that was about it. In my job as a control systems engineer i never soldered one joint and was not supposed to. There were technicians with their quality control processes and procedures for that, they didn't want engineers to come and mess it up. Now, i'll take on anyone in any kind of soldering but that is a skill i maintain as a hobby, not for my profession.
I have another joke, do you want to hear it? Never mind, i'll tell it anyway: How can you tell who installed the additional electronics box in the cabinet? Easy - if it was the mechanic, he constructed extra shelving, bolted it on and fixed the box on the shelf with screws. If it was the technician, he fastened the box with duct tape to one of the struts in the cabinet. And if it was the EE he left the box hanging by the wires near the floor.