While it's actual efficacy is debatable, affirmative action was never supposed to "pull people forward" in any way. It wasn't meant to give anyone an advantage, but to offset the internal negative biases of decision makers who must abide by it.
There are many studies, for example, that show decision makers rating women or marginalized POC lower despite having the exact same qualifications as white men. Affirmative action was meant to equalize those ratings on the backend. Whether the arbitrary values used for this offset are accurate and whether the offset is still necessary today are debatable, but the point is that it wasn't meant to grant any real advantage but to offset an unfair disadvantage.
I would only say it's a good thing if there was a better system to replace it immediately. The fact of the matter is, marginalized groups are still disadvantaged in qualifying for things because of the internal biases of decision makers (whether or not they're even consciously doing it!) even though discrimination by law is forbidden. It's not their fault for doing that either - when you live in a bigoted society (notably, the entire world right now), it is more or less impossible not to have unconscious biases even if you're a good person.