You can imagine all you like. You might even be right.
But you can't tell the incompetent "affirmative action" hires from the competent (or even excellent) people until the screwups start.
And that's one reason I oppose "affirmative action" in any form: It casts a justified cloud of suspicion over anyone who might have benefited from it, even is such person was able to succeed without it.
Here is how affirmative action began, in a time when we were still a very racist country:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action#Origins
The fact that it has been taken to destructive and unfair extremes doesn’t make the original effort illegitimate. In those days, a Black person could hardly get his foot in the door of the great educational institutions or land a good job once educated. These were the days of George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door.