Since then it's been perverted into being about superficial immutable physical characteristics like sex and skin color, which is now, ironically, contributing to more racial discrimination and less meritocracy than before. It's a clear example of the "road to hell being paved with good intentions".

By focusing on diversity like this you are elevating these immutable characteristics beyond the importance of individuality, pre-judging what people will bring to a team based on things like skin color or gender. It seems like racism has just gone full circle. I'm sure I will get downvoted to hell as this is a very unpopular take.

First there’s the pressure of “we have to do something now and it has to be externally apparent”, the choice to go with the most outwardly visible change, then other organizations following suit, and soon it becomes mandatory with everyone convinced they are working on resolving the underlying problem.

However, even if the underlying causes behind socio-psychological dynamics that fuel discrimination and xenophobia are unlikely to be best addressed through eliminating the symptoms of it by enforcing diversity via the very mechanism of discrimination by external in-born traits, that action may still help address some adjacent core problems (for example, somewhat reducing the income gap correlating with certain such traits).

In the mean time what do you think happens?

Lot of blundering about. If you focus too much on the blundering most cancer hospitals will get shut down.

Of course, to reiterate, in this case the ‘treatment’ is likely addressing the root causes of adjacent problems, and in dire circumstances even a temporary relief could be worth it, so I would not call against it.

My worry is that as one particular way of addressing discrimination (through applying discrimination, no less) becomes the default, it’s cargo-culted and there is very little incentive to understand and fix the underlying issues that said discrimination is a symptom of—which (underlying issues) may well fester until they manifest themselves as a new, possibly worse symptom.

No, it's not. It's about social justice and corporate citizenship. Viewpoint heterogenity and other arguments of private benefit have always been secondary arguments.

> Notably, institutions like academia and media increasingly consider viewpoint homogeneity something akin to moral purity

AFAICT this isn't increasingly true of either, though it's perhaps slightly increasingly true (with different favored viewpoints) within individual media firms rather than the media as a whole. The argument that it is increasingly true tends to come from supporters of what was, until recently, the dominant ideology in those institutions and all of society, and is more about that viewpoint no longer being as strongly favored than increasing homogeneity.

it's more akin to a sales tactic

compare the shift in preeminence from "free software" to "open source." the pioneers make a moral/ideological argument why doing such-and-such thing is an imperative, get visibility and carve out a niche, but don't achieve mass adoption. bit later, the strivers show up and argue such-and-such actually just makes good business sense, and this proves interesting and palatable enough to get fully institutionalized

or, say, the shift from "gay liberation" to "gay rights." the argument in the 60s and 70s was that we're inherently subversive entities whose lifestyles by their very nature go against the status quo. by the 00s the dominant line is if only we had these and those legal rights, the final obstacles to our complete willing assimilation into the status quo!

as "diversity" continues its transition from ideal championed by believers to administrative function served by a professional class, it will continue to mutate in a way that benefits those who implement it

I know studies have shown this at the organizational level, but has there been much work teasing apart cause and effect? You can make a case that organizations welcoming of different viewpoints outperform for that reason, and they attract and retain diverse people for the same reason.