You are stawmanning. You are attempting to say what they think meritocracy is - and your basing your thoughts on your own stereotypes.

> You had examples of CVs with woman names removed getting more callbacks

That is not meritocracy.

Yes, that's what I'm saying. These systems claimed to be meritocratic but empirically weren’t. AA was introduced as a corrective, not a rejection of merit. Was it successful at correcting it, did it introduce other defects, I don't know, but you can see that implementation of AA can result from wanting to be more meritocratic, not less.

But that's what we live in. We can't force meritocracy on people when they have the ability to accept and reject candidates in a biased way