As was/is the case with the term, critical race theory, the social and cultural far right have no idea what the word woke represents, let alone on how to define, or provide an adequate definition to such terms.
The question was a trap. It is never useful to ask someone what a word "means." The question is always hostile, and it "works" because it begs the question of whether the word has some sort of sacred meaning that anyone using it is obliged to know and respect. But words don't work that way.
People use words to mean what they mean to say. If they fail to communicate, that's a problem, but the right question to ask someone who complains about wokeness - if you honestly don't get their drift - is "What do you mean by 'wokeness'?' A quiz on how the interrogator understands the word serves no useful purpose in the context of a conversation, although, as I said, it's a nifty rhetorical trap that the wokesters have been exploiting ever since they sprung it. Ms. Mandel was criticizing people whom Dr. Watson appears to support. That she used the wrong word to describe them doesn't change their behavior or the validity of her rejection of it.
If it will help, here's what I think "woke" means when it is used pejoratively: Overly focused on the social justice implications of everything anyone does. The key to the usage is "overly." We should all care about social justice, but most of us pick our fights because we have other fish to fry. The people Ms. Mandel describes as "woke" have no other fish. Everything either is or is not an affront, and every affront must be "called out," using as many woke buzzwords (white, privilege, patriarchy, male gaze, centering, platforming, misogyny, -phobic, cis-het, etc.) as possible. There is really nothing vague about the usage, although it certainly is a weaponized appropriation, a rhetorical ploy as powerful as "What does 'woke' mean?"
I hope that clears things up for those who didn't understand what Ms. Mandel meant.
As for SVB, DEI played a part. DEI Board members immunize the board from the simple observation that it has too few BANKERS. It didn't have too few White men; it had too few people who could tell the CEO not to be so dumb. I assume the CEO didn't want bankers on his board, but by putting DEI tokens where bankers should have been, he silenced criticism from the left. I also assume that minority bankers were available, but the whole point of the attack on "woke" is that no SJW looked at the appointees and said "Why isn't any of these people a banker?" Not their fish to fry.
Something very similar happened in the Great Financial Crisis. The cynical bankers made crappy loans to people with lousy credit. But those people were to a politically important extent minorities, so no politician could complain about the lending. In 2006, it was the CRA, now it's DEI. These things are not causes, but they are skid-greasers.