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I think you're underestimating the efficiency of modern capitalism.
It's true that someone who visibly dedicates themselves to fighting the problem while incidentally making the problem worse is the optimal form for any activist group to take, in terms of market efficiency and power relations.
But someone who knows that they are making the problem worse and is trying to do that, while cynically pretending to care about the problem and making it better, is not the optimal form for such an endeavor to take.
Someone who is cynically acting can be an unconvincing actor, they can get private emails or texts leaked, they can not understand all the shibboleths well enough to pass as a believer or be unmotivated to care enough about the topic to pass as a zealot. They can fail in their mission of deception.
Much better to have an actual zealot who is incompetent enough to keep making the problem worse while trying to fix it. They will always be credible as a true believer, because they are; and there are plenty of zealots who are also incompetent along this axis.
Markets are efficient enough to wind up with those people in charge, since they have the truest competitive advantage here.
Yep, this is the answer. It's not that individual people are cynically trying to better themselves, although I'm sure there's a small group of those in the non-profit space. Having read a lot about this and talked about it quite a bit in EA circles, the problem is that these non-profits tend to select for people who are passionate and socially skilled.
Honestly in the NGO space, social skills and ability to be pleasant to talk to are the #1 selector, far more than most people think. This means that non-profits by their nature raise people who are socially skilled and passionate to the top, and it's quite rare to find people with actual talent in that position. Usually because talented people will sort into other fields where they can make more money or have more of an impact.
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