I think I do less steelmanning and more just telling them that the situation isn't as dire as it sometimes seems.

I speak from experience within a large public university. Yes, there are woke people and woke administrators, and yes the woke policies are getting in the way of education. But the amount of wokeness is a lot less than many people think. It's usually a handful of true believers in key positions, coupled with lipservice by the non-believers. If you can just navigate around the true believers, it's usually okay.

At a macro level though, these small margins eat away at the efficiency of our organizations, so it's still a big problem overall.