This is/was largely about fundraising, which seems pretty dependent on this, especially in EA/startup spaces. One potential funder specifically passed because of this. I'm sympathetic to this direction, because as a funder (resource allocator) you need some way of evaluating cost/benefit/risk/expected-payoff, and the exercise itself can be pretty useful for better calibration (even if still not precise enough to be action-guiding).

I guess a better framing for this lesson would be "I should have compromised to get the resources I needed to execute my vision, because otherwise the chance my vision succeeds is significantly worse". Not all compromises are worth it of course, but this one probably was!

AGI going well for humans in my mind suggests we all get uplifted as much as we like into some post-scarcity utopia, and if that happens I can't imagine animals getting a different outcome. It may be delayed, it may look different, we may not even have direct control or understanding of it, but it seems implausible that for some reason superintelligence deems humans uniquely important compared to other biological sentience.