I agree with much of your point that a lot of EA criticism has little effect because it seemingly doesn't touch the underlying model being criticized. This is an underrated and quite important point in my opinion.
Something I find suboptimal about your post is that its written as if the failure in communication here is entirely, or almost entirely, the fault of people criticizing EA. Almost all of the suggestions are about what people criticizing EA should do better, and the only suggestion about what any EA entity can do better is the vaguest one of them all. The dialogue shows no hint that any EA entity could do anything better. I find this idea to be both incorrect and unproductive.
Here's an example in this direction. Your post suggests:
People critiquing EA should do more ideological turing tests. In particular, they should recognize that a sizable fraction of EA leadership is currently concerned that AI is “somewhat likely” to “extremely likely” to lead to the end of human civilization in the next 100 years (often <50 years).
And why is it that people don't understand this? I'll suggest that not unrelated to things like how the big EA longtermist book, written by the foremost EA public representative and widely promoted to the public, doesn't talk about how a prominent priority of EA longtermists is medium term AI doom timelines, as you yourself gestured towards.
I don't think it's that easily separable. For example, if, like me, you think that EA as a whole is ridiculously inflating the risk of AI, then you also have to think that there is some flaw in the EA culture and decision making behavior that is causing these incorrect beliefs or bad prioritization. It seems reasonable when opposing these beliefs to critique out both the object level flaws as well as the wider EA issues that allowed them to go unnoticed. For example, I don't think your criticism applies to the vulture post, because the differing financial incentives of being an AGI risk believer vs skeptic is probably a contributor to AI risk overestimation, which is a valuable thing to point out.
This seems very reasonable.
I don't think this makes sense as a retroactive explanation (though it seems very plausible as a prospective prediction going forwards). I think the leaders of longtermist orgs are mostly selected from a) people who already cared a lot about AI risk or longtermism stuff before EA was much of a thing, b) people (like Will MacAskill) who updated fairly early on in the movement's trajectory (back when much more $s was put into neartermism community building/research than longtermist community building/research), or c) funders.
So I think it is very much not the case that ("The vultures are circling") is an accurate diagnosis of the epistemics of EA community leaders.
(To be clear, I was one of the people who updated towards AI risk etc stuff fairly late (late 2017ish?), so I don't have any strong claims to epistemic virtue etc myself in this domain.)