> Because in practice, it seems to me that DEI is almost always used to justify some kind of grift or other uselessness (renaming master to main, for example).

I would never have thought of this as DEI. I normally only think of DEI in terms of jobs, hiring, and similar. Though I can see how someone might try and fit it under Inclusion.

> There is a narrative in the Democratic party that DEI policy is good and must not be questioned, which is stupid as hell because it basically is guaranteed to burn out any goodwill that folks might have had to the concept.

I agree there is too much of people not being able to communicate and talk things out. Any sort of patience and willingness to talk things out can be exploited by bad actors to waste your time energy and effort, especially online conversations, and that results in people shutting down conversations as a defense mechanism. The end result is some amount of tribalism where people talk to protect and promote their tribe instead of communicating. Community standards need to improve for that to get better though and that takes time.

The above communication issue as far as I can tell is not directly connected to DEI and would still exist if everyone was focusing on some other topic.

The approach that I thinks works with one on one conversation, but may not scale well to groups, is to take on topics individually. DEI, is to big and too broad and means different things to different people. Cheating on an FAA test, corruption, failure of leadership, those are easier to get broad agreement on topic by topic.