As an example, some parts of the internet ostracised Brendan Eich for a personal donation he made to support a Californian ballet proposition on same sex marriage; forcing his resignation. There were no complaints about any of his behaviour or actions at Mozilla whatsoever.
That's not a good thing to be doing.
As another example, the recent Stack Overflow changes where a controversial, over-empathsised policy change on respecting pronouns (also pretty much a non-issue, I have never seen pronoun complaints come up on Stack Overflow) has forced multiple community moderator resignations and a widespread community revolt.
These changes are often negatives for the projects involved.
Could you expand on this? My naive impression is that VCs do their best to make hard-nosed expected-value-in-USD estimates, perhaps specifically estimating the likelihood the company will be worth >$100M/$1B or whatever; and that acting like that is probably in their job description because they're investing other people's money who expect a return.
How does the phenomenon you describe fit in? Is there some group of VCs that believe that championing "diversity and inclusion" is likely to lead to 10x growth? Does the company making the pitch make that claim—or, as one reading of your words suggests, claim that not having achieved 10x growth in the past is due to the lack of such championing? Or do VCs face social pressure (from, I dunno, other VCs, journalists who write about them, whoever else they talk with) to make it look like they're funding virtuous causes (er, companies)? Seems like the last is most plausible.
Companies with a strong business model don't seem to do this whole bullshit virtue signaling, whether it's about diversity/inclusion or "values" unless there is an actual problem with one of those things.
The VC-funded ones that usually have no long-term, profitable business model are the ones to brag the most about "diversity and inclusion" or similar things. It's as if they were saying "we'll run out of money in 3 years, we pay shit, but hey at least we're diverse and inclusive and (pretend to) have values; wanna work for us?".
One company went as far as banning words and idioms like "blacklist" and "elephant in the room". I mean come on, were these words even being a problem or are you just looking for a problem so you can push your virtue signaling to the next level and obviously write the obligatory blog post?
Whether that actually translates to more VC funding or not is unclear, but the majority of VC-backed companies seems to be doing this charade nowadays.