The only thing it damages about Altman is the credibility of him using his purported concern for AI safety as a PR lever for regulatory capture.
If I am good at hacking computers, it does not mean that I should hack all of them and get to the jail.
This is fair that it's a distraction from the mission, but randomly firing him and now having all their staff leave and probably losing all the compute funding is a strange way of dealing with it.