In an ideal world, it would be. However, because of mainly the US' political system, people of different demographic backgrounds - like class, race, family wealth, etc - will not have access to the same education as others.
In an ideal world, everybody (in in this case the US) would have access to the same standard of living, the same standard of education, and everyone would start at the same point in their career, so that employers can do blind job applications (censoring out an applicant's name, age, gender, etc) and hire on merit alone.
But that ideal is still far away, as is blind interviewing. Especially in tech where people are judged not only on merit, but on personality as well - you have to work with them, after all. And that's when things like classism, racism - not even the morally indefensible or conscious type - show up.
This isn't what AA/DEI policies do though. Working with your analogy AA is this:
You have two kids a boy and a girl. You give the boy a cookie, and the girl gets nothing. Eighty years later your adult grand kids buy cookies and give them to all the little girls in they neighborhood and explicitly exclude the boys because their great aunt didn't get a cookie.
This fixes nothing. The original girl got nothing, the later generation girls get a preference though there's no evidence that they were discriminated against in their own lives or even if they lack cookies. And later generation boys are harmed regardless of how deserving they are of receiving a cookie.
Your non-analogous analogies are strawmen and we really don't need to make analogies or strawmen if we want to discuss AA, DEI, or discrimination. We're all adults and are able to communicate without using analogies or metaphors.
> the later generation girls get a preference though there's no evidence that they were discriminated against in their own lives or even if they lack cookies
If you're going to talk about generational effects of racial discrimination, then, the answer is, yes, there is plenty of evidence that racial discrimination has a profound impact between generations, even if the primary racism was against a previous generation.
Nobody admits averages or hires averages, they admit individuals and hire individuals. For any given individual you can't say that they suffer any disadvantage simply by way of being a member of a particular identifiable group.
Anyone who uses group metrics to include or exclude an individual is just being racist, sexist, or some other -ist.
