Reading your footnote 2, I got reminded of Rutger Bregman’s The School for Moral Ambition. Rutger Bregman’s “Moral Ambition” project (the book and the School for Moral Ambition) is one real attempt at this, though notably not from inside EA. He explicitly reframes doing good as the ambitious/high-status choice rather than a guilt-driven sacrifice. He is targeting elite-university students headed for McKinsey/consulting/finance, running selective competitive fellowships modeled on prestige-recruiting machinery, and defining moral ambition as “the will to be among the best, but with different measures of success.”
What’s suggestive is that this had to happen outside EA, partly as an explicit critique of it (Bregman frames EA as too guilt-coded, too analysis-paralyzed, not aspirational enough).
That said, Bregman doesn’t engage with the actual meta-question you’re raising — whether openly naming status as a lever backfires. He just uses the lever; there’s no visible theorizing about whether the explicitness itself is corrosive.
Interesting reflection on Mathematics: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iEkksmar6mtuQtdsR/jacob_hilton-s-shortform