Most people don't care about D&I. Neither for or against, just an annoyance.
Add to this that most people don't like being preached at not to be racist etc. when most already aren't.
> handling issues through HR as normal is no longer sufficient
I am almost certain most of these "diversity and inclusion staff" you speak of are part of HR, so yes, it is still normal.
I get it, you don't want to preached to about something you aren't, but isn't that life in general? Being told stuff daily that either doesn't apply to you, you already know, or would never do?
To me, that's not life, that's being micro-managed or treated like a child. I'd never want to work somewhere that treats employees like that.
> isn't that life in general
Sure, it still happens, but if it happens repeatedly in the workplace, I might try to reduce it. I also sincerely doubt that a terrible racist person will stop being one because his company implements mandatory diversity training.
That may not have been the case at Mozilla but it absolutely is at a lot of bigcos and in government.
"Training" from HR means "watch dumb videos in a browser for two hours, then take a quiz you could have passed with a 100% score without watching the videos". If you're really unlucky it's some in-person variant that's the live equivalent of that. If this is not what you mean you're doing when you tell someone you've got "training" this week, you'll need to specify, because that's what all your fellow-suffering workers will assume it is. Many of them probably experience it at least annually, on a schedule, no matter how many times they've done essentially the same crap, and some more often.
I've been fortunate to be with small companies almost my entire career so I've experienced this first-hand exactly once, but my friend circle's not at small companies and not in tech. That's what they talk about when they talk about (complain about, commiserate over) "training". It's super common.
Maybe, but:
> Neither for or against, just an annoyance.
Viewing it as an annoyance is both “against” and very much not an example of not caring.
I'm not saying this is your actual motivation, but it kind of comes across as a clumsy attempt of someone hostile to the idea to try to get people in favor to back off by conjuring an image of the maligned neutral that they think those in favor will be more sympathetic to than actual opponents, but failing to be able to even imagine what neutrality would look like when presenting the argument.
> When people say they're "neither for or against, just annoyed" about something, they usually mean that they genuinely don't care about the underlying issue, and the annoyance comes from the idea that they have to care about it. I think this is pretty much just the maligned neutral you're describing.