I appreciated the Campbell quote in the article ... "I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive ... so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive." Campbell embraced Star Wars for this reason.
Life is a rare and brief thing - and to an extent, It (if not the universe) needs an audience to appreciate It. Woes and the rat-race and buying meaning from vending-machines are a cheezy substitute for 'Drinking life to the lees' as Omar so sagely puts it. More wing-suits please.
> Hence the need for a childrens tale to explain to the little ones why their infant brothers or sisters weren't coming home from the hospital
This makes no sense; if the problem was worse before, why would you suddenly need a new story for it? If the need was real, the relevant stories would have originated long before the 20th century.
The approaches that worked for the past 100,000 years also worked in 1904 and still work now.
(Also, the book is explicit that the children of Neverland found their way there by falling out of their perambulators (strollers); they did not fail to come home from a hospital.)
meanwhile the book’s words about what happened to those children are a fiction hinting at the truth of the loss of a child and are more symbolic than literal documentary words
Hence the need for a childrens tale to explain to the little ones why their infant brothers or sisters weren't coming home from the hospital: it was something most families grappled with, and "they've gone off with Peter Pan to have adventures beyond the rainbow" is easier on a toddler than confronting them with the enormity of death.