Hiring committee at google knows none of your demographic information. They never see your face, and make their hiring decision based on the written feedback from interviews. Diversity in this case meant bringing more diverse candidates into the pipeline, rather than lowering criteria for acceptance.

Why would you assume DEI programs led to people who were unqualified being hired? I never saw that. What I saw was a pool of 100 equally qualified people, and recruiting biased towards reaching out only to certain sub-groups of those people. But they didn't lower the hiring bar. They just only actively recruited people from certain groups.

I also saw during rounds of promotions where HR would say "here are all of the diversity candidates in your org. Let's make sure we're evaluating them for promotion and actively working towards giving them work that will get them promoted".

I never saw a case where two people were interviewed and the "diversity candidate" was less qualified but hired. Nor did I ever see a case where a diversity candidate was promoted ahead of someone else. Each was hired or promoted based on their own merits. The DEI part was making sure there were more in the pipeline to look at.