Not answering your specific question, or strawman to discredit cynicism, but to your point, the cynicism comes from manifesting not being something that can be substantiated by any metric.

“Having a goal” doesn't need telekinetic abilities or a connection with a sentient universe that alters other people’s behaviors for your benefit. Whereas manifesting and similar concepts rely on this. Additionally, they rely on any positive outcome to be retroactively attributed to what was manifested. And negative outcomes to be attributed to not manifesting hard enough. Both the manifesting and the outcome are unilaterally made by an individual and have no ability to be part of any statistic to judge its utility, hence the unsubstantiated nature, in fact it exempts itself from being able to be substantiated.