Absolutely! I think there's a group of people who get sucked into the narrative of X being the world's largest problem, and then get really exasperated when people are working on anything other than X. They see inattention to X as almost an affront.

Substitute for X "climate change", "AI risk", "Nuclear risk", "Energy depletion". And interestingly the X's are mutually exclusive. So climate change maximalists and AI risk maximalists can be mutually exasperated at each other.

BTW, this is not to say one of the narratives is not true. But they can't all be the unique #1 problem.