Microsoft tops Fortune 500 charts for diversity and inclusion

It's extremely important for global companies to have representative workforces if they want their products to succeed across the board and around the world. I got to see it in action when I was at Amazon, for years the common belief was that foreign products didn't sell in Japan, Sony dominated electronics and even companies like Apple struggled back in 2011. When we worked on launching the Kindle in that market Sony dominated eBooks and was seen as unbeatable. We hired Japanese engineers across age, gender and socioeconomic backgrounds to ensure that the product we built would appeal across the board in that market and studied Sony's reader to determine it's strenghts and weaknesses. The Kindle released in Japan was built for the market, including handling Kanji and helper characters better than Sony's readers did. It took us 72 hours after launch to pass Sony's marketshare in Japan, and we never looked back. Having a diverse team with strong representation from both western US based engineers and talent from the market we were launching in led to Japan becoming one of the largest markets for the Kindle and defeating a supposedly undefeatable opponent that Microsoft and Apple to that point had failed against in the consumer electronics space. Similar efforts within the US have led to Amazon's penetration into lower income and minority communities (for better and worse, honestly), and always started by making certain we hired, retained and listened to people in the spaces we were trying to reach. More important was hiring in spaces we were not in without any intent to sell into those spaces, they often revealed markets we couldn't see due to our own lack of awareness, and multiple projects I was a part of were behind the scenes successful in ways I didn't know existed because talent we had brought in pointed out things we were not aware of. IMO companies only ever get stronger the more diverse their workforce, and especially their leadership. They have hit a lot of walls the last few years as a company, the overwhelmingly white, male C suite executives have become an impediment to continued success and it's obvious both in terms of the type of growth they have at the moment and the general perceptions of the company starting to decline. I spent nearly 9 years there, and the lack of innovation over the last couple years was disheartening given the early promise.

That's not anywhere on my list of reasons why I buy a product or service. If a company produces something at a value that I wish to pay for, then we have a business transaction.

My own work life experience in a technical organization was for years that the organization looked for its STEM talent wherever it could and actively tried to steer local minority youth into STEM careers with paid internships, coop hiring, and summer fellowships. Good STEM talent is rare, finding more is always good regardless of source. However, this needs-driven approach was not sufficient for certain (politically driven) powers and a new regime came to power focused on demographics above all. Their solution was to "fluff up" the organization by adding non-technical jobs and filling them primarily with diversity hires. The line of business productivity wasn't improved in any meaningful way but at least tbey got the demographics they wanted to get the external pressure off their backs.
Didn't do much for morale or overall efficiency, though, when high visibility jobs were...constrained.
The job used to be fun and got...somewhat less.
I moved on. I have no idea how MS gets their statistics but I do know that as a broad based multinational they have a chance to recruit competent-to-brilliant personnel from everywhere. If their approach to diversity is to actively seek out top contributors with a fixed minimal talent level regardless of source then a (secondary?) focus on diversity makes sense: it is a matter of finding talent wherever it might be found. No reason to object. Diversity for diversity's sake, though, is meaningless-to-counterproductive.

There is literally no such thing as a diversity hire.

Oh, there definitely is.
People hired solely to improve the organization's statistics. They end up in high visibility minimal productivity jobs. Window dressing. Some know it, many don't.
Maybe not in your world but they exist; I've seen it. For that matter, in the government contracting world there are hundreds of small, minority owned business that exist solely to bid on federal contracts and then sub-contract the work to majority-white companies that aren't allowed to bid on those set-asides.
There are dozens of documented cases including a 2008 SCOTUS decision putting strict limits on the practices of set-asides.
This is but one: https://pacificlegal.org/chicagos-racial-contracting-set-asides-hurt-min... Note the case of the guy who got hired to get the company to qualify for a contract and fired once they got it. Mixing racialist policies with business is...tricky.
I'll go no further but if you do an online search you'll find abundant documentation of how...tricky.