Parks, Experiences, and Products is one division of The Walt Disney Company. There is an expectation that this division makes money for the company. If they are not earning money from two of their 12 parks thats not a great thing so you take away from other areas. It gets trickier because 2 of those 12 Disney doesn't own at all so they have nothing more than a licensing fee for those (Tokyo). The other 10 Disney has full or at least some ownership stake.I’m with above pp- admittedly I’m not in business, but I fail to see why a park in Asia partially owned by the Disney company should have any effect on any of the other parks in the world. WDW and DLR are their own things, as well as DLP. WDW profits aren’t dropping because parks in China are closed, so why should there be any type of cuts? Even if there are fewer visitors from China at WDW right now, the parks are clearly not suffering from low attendance- they’ve been very busy since RotR opened. Just doesn’t make sense to me. Granted, the Epcot stuff, how many people are really watching those videos the last hour of the day anyways? People are waiting around the lagoon. Disney doesn’t really need an excuse for that, they’ve done that sort of thing many times. But reducing hours, cutting expansions, etc doesn’t make sense to me.
WDW profits aren't dropping like you said but that doesn't matter. They want those profits to be even higher because of the closures in Asia to make up for the loss of those two parks. Entertainment, operations and construction cuts are the easiest to make for that. Why keep the park open from 8AM-12AM when you can have it open 9AM-10PM? Its cheaper from an ops standpoint to have a park or attraction open for a shorter period of time. Disney still gets your money either way. They don't make a huge amount more in order to justify that extended time period.
Also like you said how many people are going to these shows and films that late? So why pay CMs to operate it? Cut the costs.
If people are coming in droves to the parks too why do we need to keep pushing through large projects? If they can get by with smaller improvements (castle makeover) then thats good enough.