There are 3 kinds of candidates you can aim to hire:
1. Smart & ethical -> Highly competent, "best person for the job" in the classical sense, but when the organization itself is obviously complicit in criminal activity, these people will resist, or refuse to work there.
2. Smart & unethical -> These people ARE used in very special roles (e.g. Epstein), and they are very closely monitored and controlled. Hiring them for normal jobs is doom. They sell your state secrets on the darknet, they create fiefdoms within the organization, they get blackmail and then eventually they're controlling you. Joseph Stalin was one of these. He destroyed everyone around him and consolidated power, and became a dictator. Nobody wants to hire these.
3. Dumb -> These people don't really have that much of an ethical framework because there's just not that much going on up there. They're fairly obedient and you can usually convince them that what they're doing is a good thing.
I think a lot of what manifested as DEI was an intentional transition from training and hiring people of type #1 to people of type #3, because they were deemed to be less troublesome overall. The biggest problem is that a lot of people that appear to be #3 are actually somewhere between #3 and #2, they're not Stalin, but they will absolutely be scheming against the organization they work for.
Net result of all this is that there's a lot more chaos than you'd normally expect.