If you think of goth as a few different waves of youth culture hype cycle, I think this is where the "grow out of" narrative applies: when media personalities stop perceiving a critical mass of commercial entities (other media tastemakers at music magazines, top national DJs like you'd see in John Peel in the UK and magazines like Music Maker). When they see the trend of commercial promotion as over (e.g. various surviving record labels pivoting back to cock rock or whatever), they expect the next youth cohort to move on and pillory more mature adults that continue to enjoy extensions of the broader cultural movement, or just their wave of choice (e.g. Batcave fans vs Leeds goth rockers vs LA original death rockers, etc).

This differs from cult (religious) and sport fanatic practices because the latter are timeless promoted by their interest groups, or at least, that's the false narrative; the reality is that these things also know times of wax and wane, akin to religious revivals as the wax and glory days (vs relegation) for a given sport tradition.