This is exactly on point. I will amplify with my own experience. 

Until a few years ago I was working as a mid-career research scientist, no I won't tell you what field. Within my collaboration I was known for being extremely productive. I've seen jaws drop when I show colleagues my publication list.

Then it came time to start applying for junior professor positions. 

Got a few interviews, but doors kept getting slammed in my face. It's a very opaque process ofc, they never tell you why. In one case however I had the dean - a portly Hispanic woman - tell me two minutes into the interview that "women in STEM are very important to me", and ultimately heard informally from one of the profs at that dept that I hadn't been hired because of interference from the dean, despite all of the profs on the committee wanting me, and that instead they'd hired ... no one. 

That was in the US. Meanwhile in Canada, where open discrimination against white men is not only legally allowed but federally mandated, the federal government rolled out a research chair program that was only available to applicants who weren't white men, while telling universities that if their faculties weren't diversifying overall they wouldn't qualify for the research chairs. After that I heard from two different deans, at two schools, that there was an unofficial moratorium on hiring white males. Sure enough, every subsequent new hire I saw was a non.

At the same time, "diversity statements" became mandatory for application packages, basically everywhere. These require the applicant to wax poetic about how much they love DEI, how much they will do to advance DEI, how DEI is the absolute center of meaning for their lives. It's a bit much to demand guys write about how they adore a system that discriminates against them. I have my pride. So if a diversity statement was required, I did not apply. Whoops, there go like 90% of available positions. 

Just because a school doesn't have an explicit DEI policy, doesn't require diversity statements, etc., means little. One European university I applied to provided detailed feedback, not just on my application but those of other applicants, due to some kind of transparency policy. This was very informative. Not only was the (female) referee noticeably biased towards women, she gave a 1/5 rating to every teaching statement that didn't mention diversity ("no mention of diversity" was literally the only comment she made on most of the teaching statements). 

Needless to say, as this situation continued, I became rather discouraged. My research activity slowed and then basically stopped. What the fuck is the point. I killed myself for like a decade, for what? 

This isn't a sob story, I'm not fishing for sympathy here. In the meantime I started writing, building an audience, and for now I'm supporting myself reasonably well as an essayist, with the added bonus that I can work while traveling and living wherever I want. And honestly, I've always wanted to be a writer. So it's working out reasonably well for me, personally. 

But if it wasn't for DEI it's very likely that I'd still be in the field, happily doing scientific research, supervising students, and so on. Instead whatever resources were used to train me got poured down the drain, as far as the system is concerned. 

And I know for a fact that my particular story is very far from unique, and is very far from being limited to academic science departments.