As far as I know, it is part of a long-term D&I initiative which has much more aspects to it. For example, your review weights your D&I performance as important as your technical performance.

To me, this screams that you are in an organization where technical performance is not critical to the success of the organization.

I mean, look, I don't want to return to the days where if you were technically good, you could be a sexist jerk or a racist jerk or just generally a jerk. I don't want to work in that kind of an organization. But... equal weighting? Your organization isn't fighting for its life on technical merit, I suspect...

So what? I would argue that most companies don't live and die on their technical merit. I don't think that Toyota cares if they're using the latest JS framework or if their devs are 10% slower than the SV ideal. I for one struggle to think of a single company that is where it is only because of it's technical superiority, and not because they also knew how to sell that technology, how to talk about it, how to relate with people who should use it.

That's a different argument.

The person working on the engine should be the best qualified person to do so. And similarly for the other technical areas.

Nobody said anything disparaging about the need for sales, communication, or relationships. Only that in those respective fields you would also probably want the person who is most qualified, no?

What the hell is D&I performance?

Diversity and inclusion. So probably something about % of under-represented groups vs the majority (usually white males in the US tech sector).