Adding my two cents as someone who has a pretty different lens from Habryka but has still been fairly disappointed with OpenPhil, especially in the policy domain.
Relative to Habryka, I am generally more OK with people "playing politics". I think it's probably good for AI safely folks to exhibit socially-common levels of "playing the game"– networking, finding common ground, avoiding offending other people, etc. I think some people in the rationalist sphere have a very strong aversion to some things in this genre, and labels like "power-seeking" and "deceptive" get thrown around too liberally. I also think I'm pretty with OpenPhil deciding it doesn't want to fund certain parts of the rationalist ecosystem (and probably less bothered than Habryka about how their comms around this wasn't direct/clear).
In that sense, I don't penalize OP much for trying to "play politics" or for breaking deontological norms. Nonetheless, I still feel pretty disappointed with them, particularly for their impact on comms/policy. Some thoughts here:
To defend OpenPhil a bit, I do think it's quite hard to navigate trade-offs and I think sometimes people don't seem to recognize these tradeoffs. In AI policy, I think the biggest tradeoff is something like "lots of people who have engaged with technical AGI arguments and AGI threat models don't have policy experience, and lots of people who have policy experience don't have technical expertise or experience engaging with AGI threat models" (this is a bit of an oversimplification– there are some shining stars who have both.)
I also think OpenPhil folks probably tend to have a different probability distribution over threat models (compared to me and probably also Habryka). For instance, it seems likely to me that OpenPhil employees operate in more of a "there are a lot of ways AGI could play out and a lot of uncertainty– we just need smart people thinking seriously about the problem. And who really know how hard alignment will be, maybe Anthropic will just figure it out" lens and less of a "ASI is coming and our priority needs to be making sure humanity understands the dangers associated with a reckless race toward ASI, and there's a substantial chance that we are seriously not on track to solve the necessary safety and security challenges unless we fundamentally reorient our whole approach" lens.
And finally, I think despite these criticisms, OpenPhil is also responsible for some important wins (e.g., building the field, raising awareness about AGI risk on university campuses, funding some people early on before AI safety was a "big deal", jumpstarting the careers of some leaders in the policy space [especially in the UK]. It's also plausible to me that there are some cases in which OpenPhil gatekeeping was actually quite useful in preventing people from causing harm, even though I probably disagree with OpenPhil about the # and magnitude of these cases).