>no one has offered a serious argument why the new processes produce higher or even equivalent quality faculty as opposed to simply more diverse faculty.

This is worth debunking more directly: hiring is not and has never been meritocratic, it's heavily affected by networking and cliques (something like 70% of job hires aren't publicly listed, they just ask around if anyone has recommendations). The entire point of diversity hiring is to hire from outside of the existing cliques.