Not OP and also kinda disagree with them at the surface value of the statement, but maybe not with the underlying premise.
One of the worst people I know are "religious". Some of the kindest people I know are also religious. This gave me cognitive dissonance for while about religion.
Then I realised that all the horrible people were actually communal narcissists who grab onto the lowest hanging fruit, which is performative religion. They just want to be seen as holier-than-thou, and Churches (applies to most other religious communities, I'm just trying to be brief).
Church is no longer the lowest hanging fruit, but social media is; that's their new holier-than-thou platform.
Now, back to their core premise: I don't think religion is what these people are missing, but a sense of wholesomeness and mindfulness.
Different forms of religious practices can give people this wholesomeness and mindfulness.
My preferred practice is meditation, but I'm not really that spiritual. I guess am a bit inwardly, but I doubt anybody would describe me as spiritual.
I think it's no coincidence independent religions have developed similar methods to quiet, direct and focus the mind.
Buddhism and mediation is just the closest thing to a repeatable, scientific approach that developed. Probably because there's little externalities involved.
So, I guess their intuition about lack of religious practices is correct (In my layman opinion), but I think it runs deeper (at a mental/psychological level) rather than a divine one.
A great book I would recommend is "The Mind Illuminated" by John Yates. It covers briefly what I outlined earlier, but with a historic lense, and it also covers the colourful history of meditation and Buddhism (also briefly).
It's not so much about mediation history, but more a manual on how to meditate (written by a neuroscientists who had this same intuition about religious practices I describe above, but he explores it through his expertise as a neuroscientist, and eventually landed on mediation as the "best" practice for the mind).
There's also some spirituality in it, but if you're anti-spiritual, you can gloss over them.
Back on the topic of this thread:
I think all these witch-craft style trends we had in the past are signs of weak, idle and chaotic minds. This isn't to say every progressive person is like this (I consider myself progressive), but some are, and they paint what should be a great movement into something bad.
And let me be clear, those same weak and disregulated minds are not exclusive to the latest woke movement, they are equally as present in the opposite side, but that side just had a much smaller stage currently. That's probably because we, people as a collective, realise that being progressive is good, so we have been more tolerant of the bullshit from one side than we are from the other.
Ideally, we should be progressive without the bullshit. But alas, human nature is flawed, so we have to endure socially fad after fad in the hopes that one day we will finally learn a lesson.
Edit: wanted to add, I in no way mean to say that being spiritual or believing in a higher power is bad. If it works for some: great for them! I just think it's less "robust" if that makes sense? I'm not quite sure how better to describe it; I'd have to sit and think about better formulating it