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IMO, the problem isn't with utilitarianism as a principle, but with the fact that academic philosophers are insufferable nerds who will take absolutely anything too literally in order to poke holes in it.
The Repugnant Conclusion isn't a real problem, because it's not something anyone would actually try to implement; it's just a bugaboo for people who demand consistency *at any cost*.
Effective altruism is garbage for reasons completely unrelated reasons. It's an ideological backstop for capitalism: it says that if you have a choice between working to make the world a better place and making more money to give to charity, you should always choose to make more money, because charity professionals will be more effective than you. This approach takes the capitalist/NGO model as unchangeable, and ignores the fact that, as long as capitalism continues to exist, a better world isn't possible.
My issue with utilitarianism is that it tries to be calculated, but it's in an area where we lack anything close to sufficient information or even any objective way to find standards. For the Repugnant Conclusion, it's more to show how arbitrary utilitarianism ultimately ends up. Still, I wish I had more of a background in this stuff, just so I had some bases for comparison.