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Yes. On of my relatives was a career US military officer, and he described to me the methods through which his branch incentivized recruiters to find diverse applicants (this would have been roughly around 1989, a few years in either direction IIRC).
It seems to me like that the opinion that things just went off the rails recently is very common. I suspect there are a few reasons for this, one of them being the ability of the internet to form a coherent counter-consensus against institutional power, and one of them being that the forces of woke or whatever you want to call them really overextended in the 201Xs, using rhetoric that diverged from the more defensible "make society better for the marginalized" and veered into "make society worse for the unmarginalized." And then finally it seems to me that given the above, there is a very strong incentive for many people who see themselves in the middle to say "woah woah woah, [consequences downstream of X] are clearly too far," while glossing question of whether or not X should be removed since it caused the downstream consequences because fundamentally they support X, or something like X.
There are probably some other reasons I am not thinking of, but I find it interesting that, even though affirmative action has always been controversial, it seems like opposition to it has really been consolidating into something that might actually "stick" beyond grumbling about political correctness. It's interesting to me that this turn took about a generation, perhaps 1.5 generations ("affirmative action" dates to 1961) for the wheel to turn this far. A real reminder of both how slow and how fast society can change.
I do, however, suspect this may have happened before – with progressive overreach in the 1960s and 1970s fueling backlash leading to Nixon and Reagan. So I wonder if part of the "reason many people seem to think it started sometime in the 201Xs" is simply because a lot of younger people had grown up in an era where progressives/leftists were more chastened (Clinton) and cautious about letting their most radical members steal the microphone and run away with it. But by the time of Obama, they had grown overconfident again (and people who would have pushed for more moderation were aging and sidelined or dead or retired) so the fringes ran away with the microphone and now we're getting Nixon all over again. As one of the younger people, I'm not sure if it's different this time, but it does seem to me that, however you slice it, the question of wokeness definitely goes far back beyond 201X.
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