There are climate-change protests every day worldwide that get no attention from media at all.
These stunts make the papers mostly because they're rage-bait, and consumers get their 2 min of hate. To biased readers, protests like these or those that target average people reflect negatively, which backfires on the entire ostensible "point" of these stunts (as opposed to the actual purpose) because it can be dismissed out of spite.
The broken record you hear is "protests are supposed to be inconvenient". That is not true. They're supposed to win hearts and minds, engender sympathy, as that is what builds traction. It's possible to use inconvenience for that, but it's on a gradient. Civil rights protests were effective, but no one seriously believes it's because they managed to annoy and inconvenience average people really well.
In PETA's case, they suck all of the air out of the room from other animal welfare organizations. These public displays do not change minds so much as they drive donations. So they end up control a bigger share of a shrinking pot.
At least in PETA's case they can show examples of animal cruelty and make people aware about an issue. But I don't think there's a single person out there in the world who needs museums vandalized to learn about climate change.
Meanwhile, there are lots of examples of tactful organizations that do not get headline attention but get decent policy results.
I think this oversimplifies things because one is a younger organization, and there are a ton of similarly named ones. People can't think of very many international charities, but the ones that come to mind aren't known for being notorious and off-putting (e.g. Unicef, Red Cross). Possibly PETA cannibalizes here as without them another more appealing replacement would get similar recognition? I'm not sure.
personally it's rationalist adjacent writing that got me interested in avoiding some conventional factory farmed products
And rage-bait gets more views. Protests designed for social media? Well played!