I think this post does a great job of capturing something I've heard from quite a few people recently.
Especially for longtermist EAs, it seems direct work is substantially more valuable relative to donations than it was in the past, and I think your thought experiment about the number of GWWC pledges it'd make sense to trade for one person working on an 80k priority pathway is a reasonably clear way of illustrating that point.
But I think that this is a false dilemma (as you suggest it might be). This isn't just because I doubt that the pledge (or effective giving generally) are in tension, but because I think they're mutually supportive. Effective giving is a reasonably common way to enter the effective altruism community. Noticing that you can have an extraordinary impact with donations — which, even from a longtermist perspective, I still think you can have — can inspire people to begin to taking action to improve the world, and potentially continue onto working directly. I think historically it's been a pretty common first step, and though I anticipate more direct efforts to recruit highly engaged EAs to become relatively more prominent in future, I still expect the path from effective giving --> priority path career, to continue much more often than effective giving --> someone not taking a priority path.
I've heard a lot of conflicting views on whether the above is right; it seems quite a few people disagree with me, and think there's much more of a tension here than I do, and I'd be interested to hear why. (For disclosure, I work at GWWC and personally see getting more people into EA as one of the main ways GWWC can be impactful).
I suppose the upshot on this, if I'm right, is that the norm that "10% and you're doing your part" can continue, and it's not so obvious that it's in tension with the fact that doing direct work may be many times more impactful. While it may be uncomfortable that there are significant differences in the impactfulness of members of the community, I think this is/was/always will be the case.
Another thing worth adding is that I think there's also room for multiple norms on what counts as "doing your part". For example, I think you should also be commended and feel like you've done your part if you apply to several priority paths, even if you don't get one / it doesn't work out for whatever reason. Maybe Holden's suggestion of trying to get kick-ass at something, while being on standby to use your skill for good, could be another.
By way of conclusion, I feel like what I've written above might seem dismissive of the general issue that EA has yet to figure out — given the new landscape — how to think about demandingness. But I really think there is something to work out here, and so I really interesting this post for raising it quite explicitly as an issue.
This seems like an incorrect or at best misleading description of the situation. EA plausibly now has more money than it knows what to do with (at least if you want to do better than GiveDirectly) but it also has more people than it knows what to do with. Exactly what the primary constraint is now is hard to know confidently or summarise succinctly, but it's pretty clearly neither of those. (80k discusses some of the issues with a "people-constrained" framing here.) In general large-scale problems that can be solved by just throwing money or throwing people at them are the exception and not the rule.
For some cause areas the constraint is plausibly direct workers with some particular set of capabilities. But even most people who want to dedicate their careers to EA could not become effective e.g. AI safety researchers no matter how hard they tried. Indeed merely trying may be negative impact in the typical case due to opportunity cost of interviewers' time etc (even if EV-positive given the information the applicant has). One of the nice things about money is that it basically can't hurt, and indeed arguments about the overhead of managing volunteer/unspecialised labour were part of how we wound up with the donation focus in the first place.
I think there is a large fraction of the population for whom donating remains the most good they can do, focusing on whatever problems are still constrained by money (GiveDirectly if nothing else) because the other problems are constrained by capabilities or resources which they don't personally have or control. The shift from donation focus to direct work focus isn't just increasing demandingness for these people, it's telling them they can't meaningfully contribute at all. Of course inasmuch as it's true that a particular direct work job is more impactful than a very large amount of donations it's important to be open and honest about this so those who actually do have the required capabilities can make the right decisions and tradeoffs. But this is fundamentally in tension with building a functioning and supportive community, because people need to feel like their community won't abandon them if they turn out to be unable to get a direct work job (and this is especially true when a lot of the direct work in question is "hits-based" longshots where failure is the norm). I worry that even people who could potentially have extraordinarily high impact as direct workers might be put off by a community that doesn't seem like it would continue to value them if their direct work plans didn't pan out.
I strongly agree with this comment, especially the last bit.
In line with the first two paragraphs, I think the primary constraint is plausibly founders [of orgs and mega-projects], rather than generically 'switching to direct work'.
Maybe, though given the unilateralist's curse and other issues of the sort discussed by 80k here I think it might not be good for many people currently on the fence about whether to found EA orgs/megaprojects to do so. There might be a shortage of "good" orgs but that's not necessarily a problem you can solve by throwing founders at it.
It also often seems to me that orgs with the right focus already exist (and founding additional ones with the same focus would just duplicate effort) but are unable to scale up well, and so I suspect "management capacity" is a significant bottleneck for EA. But scaling up organizations is a fundamentally hard problem, and it's entirely normal for companies doing so to see huge decreases in efficiency (which if they're lucky are compensated for by economies of scale elsewhere).