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Notes -
This is a classic example of "spending money to incentivise a change in outcomes". It's not legally enforcing that a certain number of a housing project's contractors must be women-owned businesses, it's just providing additional funding to those who employ a certain proportion of women-owned businesses. In much the same way that initiatives like providing women with supports, extra networking opportunities (see page 44 here) or extra education + credentials indirectly results in the hiring of women into certain occupations by favouring one half of the population in such a way that they will be more noticeable by or desirable to employers, this policy structures things in a way which indirectly gets people to select women-owned businesses, thus changing outcomes via changing incentives. I don't agree with the idea that the examples provided in my post are materially different from the one you've provided as an example of DEI. You could possibly draw another (IMO even more arbitrary and fine-grained) distinction between the two which doesn't rely on the distinction between "mandating an outcome" vs just "incentivising it via funding", but that conflicts with the prior definition of DEI you've set out and suggests that you likely did not have a clear understanding of the supposed distinction in the first place.
I will also note that in one of the budget statements I referred to, "employers, training providers, schools and community organisations" were being provided grants to "facilitate career opportunities and pathways for women, particularly in non-traditional industries and occupations" (page 40 here). Employers being provided grants to create career opportunities for women is pretty on-the-nose, and I'm not sure how any of that particularly differs from the "women-owned businesses" example you provided.
In addition, I disagree with how you've generally approached defining terms throughout the span of this conversation - your definition of DEI is overly centred around extreme levels of hair-splitting about means in spite of any shared ends, and I think your "retroactivity" argument fails as a defence of it (nor is calling it a "broadbrush" particularly convincing to me). For my part I can't help but argue against the repeated insistence that one should adopt terminology which "acknowledges" three million fine-grained gradations of difference while depriving people of large-scale concepts; it’s almost as if you want people never to refer to broad concepts like "blue" because there are differences between powder blue and ultramarine - but that won’t change how people feel about movements and initiatives that are clearly closely and intimately related. The very idea of categorisation exists so people can collectively refer to meaningfully related phenomena, and you can have different levels of categorisation which are more high or low-level. As such, I steadfastly reject the accusation of broadbrushing, and maintain that the usage of the term "DEI" to encapsulate all of the described initiatives is more or less appropriate.
EDIT: added more
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