I have witnessed your first sentence IRL, and have real examples across multiple companies. It absolutely IS happing.
But the bolded is the exact point. That's what's happening. The reverse is also happening - folks who are not meeting standards are keeping jobs due to the color of their skin.
I am all for equality of opportunity. But I am not for forced standards of diversity if they don't meet meet the available pools - i.e. If you have to have 40% of your engineering staff be women, when the field is 90% men, you are simply not hiring the best.
If that was the case then its not DEI but some form of leveling down, which I don't doubt has happened but that doesn't negate the converse, there is still leveling up of folks based on their skin color and sex (white and male). The latter is established and has been and likely occurs everywhere, trying to remove it via DEI is a reasonable idea if there isn't the inverse, that those unqualified are being leveled up based on the aforementioned traits.
Neither solution is perfect and people are girls.
to me it appears the right want purely objective criteria (which is not possible as objective implies subjective) and the left are emphasizing the human aspect, subjectivities, psychology against hard science etc. Right now it appears capital as a phenomenon is dictating life being immaterial it has no bounds thus affecting inside and outside simultaneously. people are self-exploiting themselves (hustle culture, info culture) in the name of unending progress and capital accumulation via the internalization of capitalistic logic, mark fisher wrote a great book on this. I think its a form of mimesis that has created a virtual entity that has embedded itself in our unconscious.