Merit based hiring and rewards are fair, and actually build trust.
The ends of the pipeline (the private companies) should never have tried to evaluate the opportunitys someone had received.
It doesn't seem to be as impactful as who you know, where you were born, who your parents are, where you live, where you go to school, what university you went to, etc. Sure, hard work is important, absolutely, but it's not the only marker.
I would have more empathy for programs that attempt to seperate things like who you know and institutional clout from a hiring process, anonymised candidates seems ideal. But this has been tried with the result of less diversity in hiring than suited the agenda of the day.