> By naming it such, it felt like an implicit dig that most altruism is not effective. Like oh your altruism is not that productive, but my altruism, well it's effective altruism.

Pretty much. A subset of altruism is effective, a subset is ineffective. And there's another term for a third subset that overlaps with both: virtue signaling. Usually people treat the term like aligns closer to ineffective altruism though, like "oh that's just virtue signaling", even though it can be both effective and virtue signaling.