Academia clearly lost their monopoly on information. Since their last moat is a monopoly on credentials, I expect them to defend it intensely.
We could make it less meaningful if employers weren’t so keen on using credentials as their own gateway. That may have more of a chance of happening if the OPs perspective becomes more prevalent and the credential becomes an increasingly worse signal for meaningful skills.
There are accreditation bodies. So I don’t think your self-proclaimed engineering degree is going to help you get a job or a professional engineering license like one from an ABET accredited school.
I don't know where you live, but in the "developed" parts of the world this is illegal. There will either be some government agency or some council of credential-giving institutions and they will give you a license to issue degrees, or most likely they will not give it to you.
In the US, you can just make up degrees — but you have to be honest that you’re unaccredited.
Accreditation is regulated by NGOs who need government approval and without that you cant received financial aid (or participate in some programs) — but you can hand out pieces of paper for completing your program.
We could make it less meaningful if employers weren’t so keen on using credentials as their own gateway. That may have more of a chance of happening if the OPs perspective becomes more prevalent and the credential becomes an increasingly worse signal for meaningful skills.