"cultural shift in the United States towards paying attention to disadvantaged groups."
Paying attention?  Or patronizing, placating, and infantilizing some while limiting, blaming, and shaming others?
It is good, fair, and right to treat everyone with the respect they deserve.  A person's moral value is not derived from skin color, or sex, or height, or ethnic background, or religion etc. but rather their humanity and their actions.
But this is wholly different from "wokeness" as it is applied.   For example, take the coca cola company that was exposed via a whistle blower that their "confronting racism" training actually contained "be less white".      You cannot solve racism one way by applying it a different way.    And the ridiculous thing is that Coca Cola knows this.  But they do it to earn brownie points with whatever group they are trying to placate.
Much in the same way one cannot say they are for women and girls and need safe spaces for women, and say that this is a woman and his discomfort somehow takes priority over the comfort of biological women and girls.
And then there are universities that, astoundingly, segregate by race in dorms and ceremonies.     One can't have it both ways: either one treats people the same regardless of their race, or one divides, categorizes, and segregates. And in some cases...whatever this is.
And it's not just in the US.   We've seen people arrested for making jokes in the UK for instance.  France has been seeing increased divisiveness culturally as well.
People have been fired for following the "wrong" twitter accounts.  Or for suggesting that men and women are different.  The woke press called Damore's memo "Anti-Diversity", when he was attempting to break what he called an ideological echo-chamber where diversity of views was not allowed. Agree or disagree with his assertions, he was proven correct for being fired for having a different perspective.  It should be noted that Damore is Autistic so it should have come as no surprise that he tends to see things differently but he was fired anyway.
As for the drag stuff, I wonder what is the limit?   We've already seen a "drag kid" dance for men.  I submit that no child should be in a bar, let alone dance for dollars.  If it was a biological, underage female dancing for straight men, I don't think it would be a discussion.  But in the woke mindset, the child is brave and to oppose such acts is bigotry.  "Why are you making such a big deal about this?" comes up quite often in these kinds of discussions.
In extreme cases, woke outrage and ridicule has led some to suicide.
And then there is the less important stuff like wokeness driving really really bad art and entertainment or celebrities complaining about "cultural appropriation."
So no, wokeness is not merely people being sensitive to others who might have had a different life experience or helping to make the world a better place by lending a hand to those who face difficulty.  Everyone would be fine with that.  But instead we have a continually shifting set of standards over which they can be outraged.