What does "it wasn't exactly optional either" mean? For whatever it's worth, Mixology course sounds terrible even as someone who partakes in alcohol.

"Other industries have moved on from this sort of model"

Source? I've worked for a few corps outside of strict tech focus and that was not my experience.

What's the end-goal of this anyways? You can't moderate social interactions, so if your company stops doing alcohol-related events, your teams are almost certainly still going to go to happy hours. I get that this would be a problem if every corporate event solely revolved around getting rip-roaringly drunk, and that would be needlessly exclusionary, but I also doubt that's the reality outside of some really fringe cases. Although maybe that is how it really goes down, and I've just had a sheltered workplace experience