What is the Case For Prosaic AI Safety Work Being Net-Beneficial?

I would like to see someone make the case for prosaic AI safety work being useful. From what I understand, the argument against looks something like “Current attempts at alignment are shallow, and only serve to paper over misaligned behaviors without addressing the underlying cause of that misalignment. This will not scale to super-intelligence, which will be competent enough to both hide its misalignment and undertake necessary actions to kill all life on Earth while doing so” (if there’s more to it please correct me). This argument seems to me to be whats happening, but it seems there’s still some disagreement about this. Does the other side have robust arguments that are more than just intuition?