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I think a lot of SJ positions are better described not as "culturally Marxist", but as a bizarro-world ideology created by starting with the cultural positions of Marxism (and there are quite a lot of them) and then going in the opposite direction of the traditional Western paradigm.
Tradition: "Men should be in charge of women", Marxism: "Sex divisions are a distraction and should be ignored", SJ: "Women should be in charge of men".
Tradition: "The white man is the best man", Marxism: "Racial divisions are a distraction from class struggle; be colourblind", SJ: "Whites suck".
Tradition: "White culture is scientifically superior to natives' primitive culture and we should raze the latter", Marxism: "All cultures suck and we should make a new, constructed culture designed by science", SJ: "Indigenous ways of knowing are just as valid as science; traditional Western culture should be razed".
The only real explanation I can see for this pattern is that SJ is the result of escalatory virtue-signalling (plus a game of Chinese whispers over the years with social psych accidentally and deliberately laundering ideology into "the science") oriented along the axis of "Tradition bad, Marxism good" and thus has positions that are "beyond" Marxism in some sense. I'm aware that this is a bulverism and basically calling the ideology meme cancer, and I really don't like being this uncharitable, but it's honestly about all I can come up with.
The opposite direction thing you describe is rationalized on essentially the accelerationist idea of hastening the revolution. Basically, once the cultural Marxist project of destroying Western civilization and capitalism has been achieved, then we can move past the "whites suck" and "women should be in charge" stuff. It's kind of like the idea that violent revolution is necessary to eventually abolish all violence.
The whole ideology implicitly endorses the idea that beliefs are only instrumental towards goals, so whatever beliefs hasten the revolution are what you should believe, and that can change depending on circumstance. Truth is kind of besides the point, since it's a distraction from winning. This is why it can be practically impossible to have a good faith dialogue with some of these people.
That said, I agree with you more broadly. In an anthropological, perhaps even ecological, sense these are just a rationalizations of runaway virtue signaling. What the participants in this culture believe they are doing is somewhat immaterial. However, the rationalizations do somewhat orient the direction of the virtue signaling spirals even if they do not provide the fuel, so they are not entirely irrelevant. It is meme cancer.
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