Ask HN: Why do software engineers respect SaaS so much?

During lunch at a developer conference, I saw a clear respect from software engineers towards SaaS, and lack of respect for other software. For example:

- When they talked someone who had a successful AI headshot app - they scoffed and said it was just a distribution game.

- When they talked about someone who made a really popular learning platform for web developers, they acted like that was not interesting.

- When someone talked about a B2B SaaS idea, they would suddenly get interested and start asking questions and give respect.

I have seen this with developers in daily life too. Am I missing something?