I'd have thought it was fairly obvious why a pitch about nerds saving the world from the cyberpunk they grew up reading might appeal to nerds! That's why AI safety organisations are often exempted from the expectation of even basic transparency about what they've done with marginal dollars never mind metrics by the very same people that expect less nerdy causes like feeding people to prove their efficiency and need for the funds in granular detail. The application of the "Bayesian" approach involving setting arbitrarily high "priors" for marginal dollars given to people like them saving humanity where the possibility of others can't even be considered looks like post hoc rationalisation (otherwise pretty much every intervention criticised by GiveWell as inefficient use of funds is subject to the "but what if one of the beneficiaries goes on to directly or indirectly save humanity from AGI/climate change/nuclear war" counter argument...)

There's nothing unique to EA in this (people convinced that most aid money is wasted sometimes give to organisations they have some sort of ethnic/political/religious affiliation or people they generally like unconditionally, and sometimes that trust heuristic has even been right!) but it did purport to be the school of altruism that didn't.

As for the Wells analogy, the two most notable uses of AI safety funds seem to be (i) attempting to build AIs and (ii) distributing fiction they believe best illustrates the possibilities of AGI, so I'm not sure I'm altogether off the mark in imagining what well-intentioned utilitarian nerds of the time (Wells certainly was one) might have done with more cash. If you subscribe to the view that I do: that "secretly unite to eliminate humanity" is a fairly non-obvious and risky goal for a class of technologies which evolved self awareness from being rewarded for meeting human needs, then popularising the idea of conflict between human and AI could be more likely to have extremely adverse unintended consequences than intended ones. Popularising the idea that it's the self aware general intelligence that's the dangerous bit about AI, not the intermediate step involving humans having access to immense calculating power whose recommendations they don't really understand seems like something of an existential risk blindspot too.