I don't think you can say that no rites of passage means not becoming an adult. Rituals smooth or explain transitions, they're not a requirement for the transition to happen.

And besides their are plenty of rites of passage into adulthood in the US - first car is huge, moving out of home, first job, etc.

I don't think they reached adolescents. They are still just wasting time escaping like when mum hands em the iPad so she can do the dishes.

I worked at big CA-based drug company, granted it was largely a phone-room but it was still a fairly serious job, with serious pay.

Most staff came up from CA and loved disney so hard. Disney movies were a topic at meetings, they expected everyone would know the characters, used disney references in presentations, characters as test patients, etc. Managers too.

Finding others who hated disney was like finding stoners at work before it was legal - all euphamisms and inuendo until you work out who to trust: "No i don't really have a favourite character", "I'm not familiar with that", "No, I ugh... haven't seen... i'm not super into... Oh thank god, yes, of course i fucking hate disney, who could possibly like the least interesting version of a fairytale marketed by a billion dollar empire founded by a nazi and evil enough to copyright happy birthday?!"

This is more or less the reason.

Disney has limited space in the parks. You can only have so many line skipping and spot reserve schemes before people spend the entire day in line for attractions. So they've been increasing prices. This combined with the glorious "k shaped' economy means that childless millenials are one of the largest demographics that have the money and nostalgia to attend them.

In Simulacra and Simulation, French theorist Jean Baudrillard once wrote that Disneyland is “presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.”

If you want to experience a worked example of this...

How Comedy Was Destroyed by an Anti-Reality Doomsday Cult