I also have lots of objections to using VNM utility to model human preferences. (A comment on your example: if you conceive of an agent as accruing value and making decisions over time, to meaningfully apply the VNM framework you need to think of their preferences as being over world-histories, not over world-states, and of their actions as being plans for the rest of time rather than point actions.) I might write a post about this if there's enough interest.