It isn't about going through the motions, but about rituals that ultimately have meaning. Rituals can be empty, yes. But they can also offer a shape and a rhythm to parts of our lives.
As for "authority figures" Campbell wasn't talking about dictators, nor was he disparaging women as valuable human beings. But look at nations that have constitutional monarchs. The monarch serves as a unifying force that most folks find comforting to some degree--regardless of whether they like any specific individual member of the royal family. Hence the great popularity of Prince William, of the late Queen Mum and of Princess Diana herself. We tend to think of the British royals too much when we think of royalty anyway. The Danish, Dutch and Spanish royal famiies are frankly better models.
Not everyone needs such an authority figure. But lots of people do feel such a need, and that is not evidence of something being "wrong" with them.
One set of rituals that we've pretty much lost are rites of passage. Individuals often go through such, but many don't and the site of middle-aged men still behaving in fundamental ways like teenagers is frankly disturbing. No less disturbing is the lack of commonality between those who have in some sense "graduated" to adulthood on an emotional and psychological level. We no longer have some kind of difficult trial of endurance that everyone goes through, hence everyone can rightly call a "shared experience." Adulthood is simply a matter of breathing long enough. Adults and children wear the same clothes, wear their hair the same way, retain identical names regardless of age or status (save women who take their husband's family name--which is something else). In the span of one second, a person in our society goes from totally without any real responsibility including being unable to hold a full-time job or be charged with a serious crime, to full responsibility and the right to have children, declare bankruptcy and be put to death.
I don't believe this is a good thing. Neither am I claiming that a return to the past makes very much sense either. Nor can any of this be imposed from above. To work, to be genuine, it must arise and be embraced from below. And we're a long, long, long way from even starting to do that.
There are times I totally sympathize with Barnabas, preferring the 18th century to the 20th. Or the 21st!