When it comes to someone calling for a political change, it doesn't make sense to apply the principle of charity based on a best case interpretation of the outcome but to focus on the likely outcome. Political ideas shouldn't be accepted on the ground that they are well intentioned.

Whether or not pushes for more evidence based policy making lead to more technocrats is an empirical question.

You claim:

Likewise, the widespread housing shortage and Sweden’s precipitous fall in international school rankings presumably are at least partly due to policy in these areas not having been evidence-based.

You fail to provide evidence for that claim. You fail to demostrate that countries that adopted evidence-based policy did better on international school ratings.

In practice the call for evidence-based policy in education often means to focus on improving standardized test scores. It's no strawman. It means to not give schools the freedom to make their own decisions about how to teach but to task them to top-down to teach in a certain way.