Is having extremely aggressive speculative future timelines actually pretty harmful to the credibility of the AI safety movement?

Reading through the stuff from the AI Futures Project and Plan A, I am finding once again that their estimates of the rate of future technological progress are extraordinarily fast, bordering on totally implausible. I am wondering if this kind of thing is actually pretty harmful, because it makes it easier to discredit otherwise valid ideas.

For example, AI 2027 predicted the creation of an AI system that "can do any coding tasks that the best AGI company engineer does" 9 months from now, which is something that I think obviously won't happen (unless you pick an extremely narrow definition of "coding" that excludes the great majority of the day to day work of a practicing software engineer today at Anthropic).

But in fact this certainly seems like something that could happen eventually in the future!

So this kind of causes a problem, because if I were to talk about some of these risks a year from now, it will be pretty easy to say "well, they were wildly wrong about their future predictions, so why should I give any weight to their policy ideas?".

In this case I believe the authors explicitly stated their estimates are deliberately aggressive and don't represent their median prediction of the future. Wouldn't it in fact be wiser to stick closer to to conservative forecasts here?