> Once you’ve got them, even if you’re more established, it would be crazy to leave them off of your resume, right?

Not necccesarily. Depending on the cert and field it may make sense to.

The goal of getting the cert should be to learn skills. If you've done that, the piece of paper doesn't matter.

> Not only could you be bypassing people passionate enough to work their way into the field through pretty adverse circumstances, you could be inadvertently reducing the diversity of your workforce in doing so

The people with all the certs still got interviewed where i worked last, it was just a consistent pattern that they bombed the interview, usually very badly on very basic questions.