There's a difference between a diverse cast and a pandering cast. Diverse casts don't make a big fucking deal out of shoving their status and labels in your face. Diverse casts let characters make mistakes and grow. A diverse cast may feature a person in a protected class as an antagonist or have serious personal flaws. Diverse casts have traits that make them whole, individual people where their diversity is just one part of their identity and purpose in the overall narrative structure.
Pandering casts do the exact opposite of this. They're shallow, narratively weak self-inserts designed to either please an invasive, entitled fanbase or fulfill some wishful-thinking fantasy on the part of the creator. Usually both. They make compromises about characterization in order to pass labeling purity tests or force characters into roles that they don't really fit into. Elements of the plot that would portray a pandering cast in a poor light are retconned or removed entirely. The audiences' time and attention is wasted on showcasing otherwise irrelevant events and characters simply because they belong to a special group. Character growth is stunted or absent as a result of smoothing everyone's path into the least resistive one possible.
Diverse casts are fine. Pandering casts are boring fan fiction shit. The end of Homestuck was not diverse. It was pandering done by a team of new writers in order to force their own worldview onto existing content. They retconned characters, changed story elements, wasted our time on irrelevent self-inserts, and ironed our character development and arc resolution in order to do so. Pandering was a signifigant factor in how the end of Homestuck was ruined.