A difficult issue with equity in hiring is that companies do not hire the _best_ applicants. People tend to think about hiring like that, but it can't actually work like that. Hiring is not a tournament; you have some (high) bar and just find enough people who can pass it, and then you stop looking! even though there might have been better people out there.
I believe this is one of the very problematic factors that drives lack of diversity in tech hiring; for example, a historically black college might pump out fewer extremely high caliber students as a result of centuries of marginalization (and not as a result of the race of the applicants); this makes going through the new hire application stacks from some schools more expensive, so companies just don't do it -- even though if they _were_ to go through that _entire_ stack, they _would_ find some candidates who meet their bar.
Relatedly, the cheapest way to find candidates are through referrals, but referrals are very likely to reinforce whatever dynamics already exist in the organization (whether that's in education, favorite sports, intro/extravertedness, race, religion, language, school, city, former experiences...)
So if you have, e.g., a referral program, or you go to college career fairs for the colleges where most of your employees went to, etc, there are already plenty of people who you are not interviewing who would pass your interview bar. And that is unfortunately already based, albeit indirectly, on race, religion, sex, etc.
Seeing it happen in the "affirmative" form is kind of like a trolley problem; you can intervene (decline to interview overrepresented groups) and cause a still deontologically problematic but potentially better outcome (intentionally decline to interview potentially qualified candidates, but increase equity and diversity in your org), or do nothing and claim absolution of responsibility, but cause an avoidable worse outcome (by passively refusing to interview essentially entire underrepresented groups).
But in practice, things are more complicated. If you have to look in more diverse places for hires, you might need a more robust hiring system (e.g., less emphasis on coding tests or less emphasis on extensive system design experience and more emphasis on figuring out who can grow into roles, which is much harder to interview for; going to more places; having more avenues for finding applicants), and you might need to interview more people. That makes it expensive, and so the natural impulse might be to lower the bar just so you can maintain your hiring at the same cost.
I don't have any explanation of the perfect way to do it that actually is equitable. It might be nearly impossible; hiring is already a really hard thing to do right. But I don't think its correct or reasonable to think of doing nothing as a "neutral" and purely meritocratic approach.