The popular cargo cult story is a mixture of stuff that happened, stuff that was made up, and focusing on the wrong stuff. It's basically an urban legend at this point of people copying from other people.

It's a bit like saying that Christianity involves handling rattlesnakes and putting nails through your hands in the belief that God will turn your fillings to gold. That kind of misses the point.

The cargo cult metaphor has very little content: there are about two main ingredients in it, based on these features of the anecdote:

1. Foreigners visit island, riding on flying machines, bearing mysterious technology and products.

2. Foreigners disappear.

3. Locals worship foreigners as gods, develop a legend that foreigners will return, and use ad hoc hand-made objects whose shape resembles foreigners' technology to summon them, such as model airplanes made of bamboo, or pretend radios.

It might all be based on a single anecdote, and that is obvious to anyone with two brain cells. There might have been as few as one actual "cargo cult". I don't suspect anyone believes there were anywhere near half a dozen of these, let alone tens or a hundred or more.

A single anecdote is enough for a working metaphor.

The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre was one particular episode in history, in one place in the world. Yet we can bring up that name in any situation where the wrong incentives backfire.