Are you sure you know what racism is? Racism isn't about race. Otherwise it wouldn't exist: there is only one human race. Racism is about culturally perceived race. The vast majority of the people who are affected by this measure come from North Africa. You know, French ex-colonies. So yes, it was a racist move in my opinion.
Concerning Shanghai index: what if I don't want to compete? The model of small French universities was good enough even for elitist standards such as international awards. It produced as much Medal Fields as the entire US system. It produced a lot of Nobel Prizes in a variety of disciplines. And most of them will tell you: in the current system where they would have had to spend months and months each year to look for funding instead of doing actual research, where they would have had a series of short term contracts working on different projects in their early career, and then would be forced to recruit collaborators on the same kind of short term contracts, they simply wouldn't have been able to conduct the research that lead them to the award.
Finally, I think you should pay attention to what it seems you don't want to hear when you listen to "grumpy french rambles". Your analysis is ridiculous. It's not the problems that are denied, it's wrong solutions. Take Parcoursup as an example. The problem is: there are more and more students coming to universities due to a baby boom starting in 2000, and there is not enough places at universities to have them. It's not like it wasn't easy to see it coming. Those kids went through the whole school system before arriving at uni. But instead of preparing for it by recruiting more professors, by building new universities if necessary (or at least new buildings), the governments decided to just wait and let the situation rot. Once it was a mess, they used it to push their political agenda of adding a selection step to enter university in addition to the one we already have which is the Baccalauréat. The new thing is: this selection step is not Nation-wide, it's done with varying criterion (which are typically not known by candidates) uni by uni, department by department. In addition to that the Parcoursup platform which runs all that is an algorithmic mess leading to deadlock (like a candidate A who prefers uni X over Y and a candidate B who prefers uni Y over X but uni X ranks B before A and uni Y A before B so A and B both wait to see if a spot will be freed at their most wanted uni but they depend on the other first giving up their place there, which won't happen because they don't know that they can safely do that) all that because they imposed stupid design conditions just so it is different from the previous system which used Gale-Shapley algorithm to solve these situations…
So sorry but no, it's not that it's wrong to "adapt and trying and reverting if it doesn't work". It's just plain wrong to do stupid things that do not solve the actual problems, especially when we can know in advance that they won't. I'm absolutely not for doing nothing (although in the Parcoursup case, nothing would have been better), I'm for doing what is actually necessary to solve problems that exists.