Affirmative action means less qualified individuals are given jobs they don't deserve in basically every format you can mandate it.

People miss the secondary implication here, though: If an ablebodied straight white male gets through affirmative action, he's SUPER qualified. Qualified beyond the ability for the SJWs in HR to veto.

Or in other words, in places where affirmative action is rampant, you can quickly and safely assume white men are de-facto the most competent and skilled people. If they weren't, they would have been replaced for diversity hires, affirmative actions. They're safe to fire, and the hiring manager often has financial incentives tied to "diversity" (such as bonus targets with hiring diversity quotas), meaning it would GAIN them money doing so. If it would gain you money to fire someone, and you don't, that says something about that person's competence.

We all know affirmative action means hiring less qualified people in order to check the boxes, that it can be rough on diversity-qualifying hires as they don't know if they're there for their talent or merely the color of their cooch, but no one really voices the logical conclusion to other side of that coin.