I kind of hate this term. it originates from the US/UK withdrawal from Polynesian islands after the local economies had been warped to depend on food shipments via plane. when people started starving, they tried to replicate what they observed as rituals associated with the arrival of planes - bright yellow vests, reflective rods to signal where planes should land, etc.. desperate people did something desperate and I hate that we denigrate them for it.

the military bases on relatively small islands decimated the local flora and fauna. we commandeered their boats during the war and deforested the islands so they couldn't build more boats to go fish. calling it a cult of any kind is utterly bizarre and it shifts blame for the tragedy onto the victims and allows the west to mock them for it. we inflicted famines because we didn't view them as fully human. we didn't even do it intentionally - we gave literally no thought to them or their continued existence. and we memorialize those dead as "cargo cultists" - because it's their "barbarism" to be blamed and not the withdrawal of an empire.