As far as I can tell, either LLMs naturally fail to be viable, we collectively decide to put a stop to it, or we end up in one of several dystopias.

My bet is that we end up building an awful outcome for nearly humans, which means that trying to put a stop to it is a duty, even if it's likely to fail. I feel the same about climate change -- it's likely that we're going to fail to keep much of earth habitable, but it's not morally acceptable to stop trying.

I now feel like the efforts put into trying to stop it are wasted and the people wasting these efforts are smart enough that they could instead be trying to steer the whole thing in a better direction.

Ignorance won't help us. I agree with the negatives, I just feel like this approach is backwards.

In which direction would you steer a house fire to lead to a better outcome?

There's no good endpoint for people if AI succeeds, it's that simple. It doesn't matter how many people get to roast marshmallows as the place burns.