This fails to take into account the difference in quality of life between a brain devoting entire stars or galaxies to fun and a human living in a poor region of Africa (as you acknowledge when you say people don't base their decisions solely on "years lived"). On the other hand, there is also the point DanielLC brought up.
I don't think the rough equality of the number of expected life-years saved reflects anything interesting. Eliezer's estimate could vary by many orders of magnitude even if its basic assumptions were true. The probability estimate could also vary by orders of magnitude.
I've run in to the argument that cryonics beats VillageReach on a simple "shut up and multiply" level, by assuming an infinity vs finite tradeoff. Having read the Fun Theory sequences, it struck me that this wasn't a reasonable assumption, so I sat down, re-read a few relevant posts, shut up, and multiplied.
In Continuous Improvement, Eliezer ballparks a good fun-theory life as having a maximum length of around 28,000 years. In Robin Hanson's Cryonics Probability Breakdown, he assigns cryonics a conjoint probability of about 6%. 28,000 * 0.06 gives us a net return of 1,680 expected years.
Full body suspension from the Cryonics Institute currently costs $28,000.
VillageReach, according to GiveWell, can save an infant's life for less than $1,000.
For the price of Cryonics, we thus save 28 lives. 1680 expected years, divided by 28, puts the break-even point at an average lifespan of 60 years for those infants saved. A quick peak at Wikipedia suggests that the average African life is under 60 years for the majority of the continent, although there are some important nuances to really get a full picture.
Obviously, these are rough numbers, and I doubt many people base their decisions solely on "years lived". I do find it rather interesting that cryonics is currently about on par with one of the most effective charities in the world on that metric, however :)