> The reason most people dislike these policies is because filtering people for having one set of wanted checkboxes is functionally identical

Not functionally identical. No grants were getting slow-rolled or cancelled.

Why are you having a hard time understanding this?

> And it's not even clear what issue they're supposed to be solving. Visit any STEM class, research lab - corporate or public, or so on even well before any of these sort of things began to be official guidelines and it was anything but homogeneous, even by the largely irrelevant characteristics that these guidelines target.

Hmm. Do you think it was an accident that these settings are not homogeneous today? Do you think these settings were different in the past? Did you spend any time trying to test your hypothesis before writing and posting it?