I also notice the change in the reasoning of proponents of these measures. The issue affirmative action was to address originally was that a hiring manager might choose a candidate based on race, the goal being fairness. Today it's moved to 'righting the wrongs of the past.' The goal I don't know, but it's not fairness.
Ideally, I would hope that everyone who has such a trait also has a group to advocate for them, and thus the hiring managers would be making perfect decisions. I do not think this is at all the case though. Regardless, I think it is better to correct for the traits that do have advocacy behind them rather than just not doing any correction at all.
Thus, I don't think we can expect the hiring process to become transparent anytime soon. It is known that the (opaque) hiring process does discriminate based on race. If I had to guess, the policy mentioned in the article is a direct response to papers like [1], which show that simply changing a person's name to be more "ethnic" results in their application being considered less. Thus I don't mind if someone tries to opaquely enforce a rule like the one in the article to counterbalance this.
I think there's the potential for self-contradiction / hypocrisy by those persons, depending on the particular logic they use.