The side effect of DEI was, in many cases, a push toward combating nepotism, cronyism, and arbitrary hiring practices in favor of hiring based on merit.

That was not a side effect, that was the intent. I worked on DEI initiatives. Nepotism, managers higher their friends instead of the most qualified candidate was part of those conversations, they were raised by the employees we talked to. All those things are forms of bias.

The DEI framework wasn’t necessarily required to accomplish that.

Intentionally addressing bias isn’t necessary to combat people who have a bias against those who are not their friends or family?

By calling the entire project “DEI”, diversity, equity, and inclusion, the debate became about the meaning and implications of those words instead of focusing on the actual institutional problems we should be addressing.

That’s literally what you’re doing though. You are claiming the problem is how we named it, and arguing if we had only referred to it as something else, it would not have been a problem.

It’s easy to complain about the efforts trying to address a problem, it’s harder to actually put forth that effort.

Also, if a political group wants to demonize something, it doesn’t matter what you name it, they will demonize it. You had states legalizing Civil Unions instead of Marriages for same-sex couples: they STILL demonized the relationships. People like you were saying “the name Marriage is the problem, just call it something else”. We clearly see now that the name was never the problem.

because you’re hiring the best-qualified employees rather than your cousin, brother, sister, or some guy who happens to look like you

That was the whole point of DEI. Data showed that diverse companies were more profitable. Addressing bias (like nepotism), especially unconscious bias (“I trust this guy more ~because he looks like me~”) was a primary initiative in DEI. The other was to encourage people who don’t normally speak up (either because they never get hired or because the environment is less psychologically safe for people like them) to do so and challenge group think. It was never meant to be”lower the bar”, but it was meant to force critical thinking around what the bar is.