Even though I've never worked a traditional full-time corporate job, this somehow isn't surprising. I suspect that basically the same thing is going on at a lot of universities and trade programs as well.

My university, toward the end of my third year or so started adding DEI topics to meetings that were known as "Donuts with the Dean" and held by each department. At Donuts with the Dean, students would come complain about egregious offenses by faculty, students, and admin, and then the deans would go off and do absolutely nothing at worst, and years to look like they were trying to do something at best, and the DEI topics were no exception. The music department students and faculty hadn't quite given up by the time I graduated, but the department that housed my other major, the general purpose STEM + humanities department, had less than five people attending the DEI meetings pretty quickly.

What really spoke volumes was all of the grad students attempting to unionize by holding campus protests and administration not being happy about that despite all of these Donuts with the Dean meetings.

I was also in a coding bootcamp where I tried to start their first ever neurodivergent affinity group and got absolutely zero support from staff, despite there already being affinity groups for women and all of the marginalized groups thrown together. The staff even claimed I was violating HIPAA even though the group was entirely self-selecting and did not require any disclosure of diagnosis, or even proof of a formal diagnosis of any kind. I eventually, after mounting disdain from the staff, got kicked out of the program.

I really think that the vast majority of DEI initiatives are just branding optics and this is why I think we see a lot more Black people such as myself being sought after to participate in these programs, because it's more visual, and brands rely on lots of visuals.