I agree that this is an important topic. Economic welfare analysis is a widely used method for cause prioritization, and a lot of it looks very different from the kind of cause prioritization work that 80k or Open Philanthropy would do. So it's useful to look into why that is.

That said, a lot of the economics literature goes beyond the simple "maximize surplus" approach that you highlight. The main subfield to look at is public economics (or a narrower subfield called public finance). That's where you find professors who understand welfare economics the most. Since at least the 1970s, mainstream public economists have studied optimal policy using social welfare functions which capture the idea of diminishing marginal utility from wealth (James Mirlees' Nobel prize-winning work on optimal redistribution is a good example. Atkinson and Stiglitz's textbook, first published in 1980, is a great resource for learning this kind of stuff. And here are a few examples of papers published in the last few years). Roughly, those papers adjust WTP by a factor to account for differing marginal utilities, as you suggest in your google doc.

Many economists who most directly influence public policy are public economics or public finance professors (as an example, all 5 professors from the University of Chicago who served on the Council of Economic Advisors in the past 12 years were from public economics), so narrow "maximize willingness to pay" thinking shouldn't be a problem for them.

However, many economists outside of public economics often do engage in the simple "maximize WTP" thinking that you're talking about. Unfortunately, more sophisticated welfare analysis often isn't a standard part of graduate school curricula (let alone undergrad courses), so a lot of economists don't know about it. These economists could be having negative impacts in a number of ways:

They directly influence policy. The main channel for this, I would expect, is macroeconomics policy. It may also impact development policy, but from what I've heard development economists rarely do any sort of formal welfare analysis (they don't even consider consumer surplus), and instead just look at ad-hoc objectives like increasing health or output.
They teach welfare analysis poorly to students. This leads to more economists who don't know any welfare analysis beyond willingness to pay.

I'm not sure how big this negative impact is, but if it turned out to be big, I think the solution would be on the education side. Basic concepts in welfare economics, including optimal redistribution, should be a part of standard graduate and undergraduate economics curricula. Interested students should be informed that if they want to learn more they should take a public finance elective. From what I hear, this is fairly common at European universities, but not at American ones.

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