> hiring people based off of their skills is unacceptable as you say, how are people supposed to make hiring decisions?

Hiring people based on skills is perfectly fine. Hiring people (or firing them, which is what this is about) and just saying it's about skills often is not. That's why I put "skills" in scare quotes. It's like when companies use "culture fit" to mean whichever races, genders, and fads the founders feel comfortable with. It's not that culture fit isn't a real thing, but much more often it's a shibboleth (or "dogwhistle" in current parlance). Similarly, "skills" is clearly the messaging IBM has chosen. Now it's up to them to prove that they were truly making efforts to optimize skills and not something else.