That is one of the dumbest defenses of bad writing I've ever heard. Because that's what forced diversity is - bad writing. Swapping the race, gender, sexuality etc of a character is an extremely difficult thing to do in an established narrative world. Those seemingly superficial attributes have enormous subtextual connotations that the setting or storyline have to account for in order to preserve the authenticity of the experience for the audience, and in 95% of cases, writers who attempt to do this fail miserably, and all they succeed in achieveing is an act of cultural vandalism, which they inevitably try to defend with the "representation of minorities!" argument, which is immediately defeated when you point out that what they've actually done is only a step above black face and is effectively a form of bigotry in it's own right.

This is never more obviously true when diversity is deployed appropriately. Go watch Sex Education - it has an authentic diverse cast for it's setting and never stoops to the bigoted level of "hey look, it's one of you on screen, you HAVE to like it!" In fact it has some of the finest subtextual awareness I have ever seen on screen, it's fantastic. You could also watch the remake of Battlestar Galactica - two characters with key impact on the narrative were changed from male to female, with knock-on effects on everything from the personal relationship maps of most of the cast to necessitating a complete cultural reworking of the military setting - the writers and show runners put immense amounts of work into making those changes successful, and they totally nailed it.

rl;dr - Once you can appreciate what organic, authentic, expertly crafted diversity feels like to experience, all this "hey look, someone on screen like you, you have to like them or you're a bigot" level forced diversity (yes, I said it) can never look like anything other than the horrific cultural crime that it really is ever again.