I can give a partial answer/pile on another example: A version of this phenomenon can be seen in the popularity and desirability of 19th-century brownstone homes in New York City. In this case the trend traces back to the upheavals of the postwar era.

For the most part, cities like New York were seeing industry leave for other regions and middle-class whites leave for the suburbs. But a subset of white-collar professionals bucked the trend and saw in the aging housing stock a way of rejecting the anonymity of the suburbs while also providing an alternative path to the centrally-planned urban renewal projects of the era. The trend has roots in Manhattan's Greenwich Village and gained life in the 50s and 60s as it spread into certain Brooklyn neighborhoods.

For this I'm mainly drawing from Suleiman Osman's The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn (2011). Osman describes a "new urban middle class," a loose coalition of liberal reformers that defined itself in opposition to both the modern city-planning agencies and the older machine politicians. By "rescuing" and renovating old townhouses and forming various new community-based organizations, they set out to revitalize a decaying, deindustrializing place to its earlier glory.

There are of course major questions about the extent to which that older place ever really existed and about the movement's reliance on caricatures of white ethnic communities and of newly-arriving blacks and Puerto Ricans. But there's no question the nostalgia for the Victorian era was real. One promotional video (timestamp 2:30) showcasing a renovated Brooklyn townhouse in the 70s even featured a fully-costumed reenactment with horse and buggy.

It's hard to pin down exactly what inspired the nostalgia for Victorian homes, but it was more than just finding an alternative to the suburbs. It was part of an anxiety held by the new white collar, service sector workforce that grew in the city as heavy industry waned. Brownstoners feared the "Manhattanization" of their neighborhoods. The sterile office and apartment towers were as frightening as the tract housing of the suburbs. As Osman puts it:

If suburbia suffered from race and class homogeneity, a different form of sameness pervaded the modern city. Manhattan’s skyscrapers, university campuses, and research centers represented a new bureaucratic society in which an alienated white-collar workforce worked in regimented anonymity. Brooklyn’s new college-educated managerial class agonized about the loss of individuality and difference in a "rational, bureaucratic world."

I came across a great post from a while back about postwar isolation and lonliness by /u/yodatsracist that dives into this exact anxiety. It focuses in part on a 1955 speech given by Adlai Stevenson, the heady, intellectual presidential candidate who was popular among the brownstoners. Stevenson paints the picture of a society where the great advances in science, technology and material goods have "swung too far" and in a the process have "developed into a powerful drive toward the precise opposite of individualism, namely totalitarian collectivism."

If the hyper-rational, bureaucratic society ushered in by the New Deal and WWII are cast as the bad guy, then 19th century homes and nostalgia for an imagined simpler time play a natural counterpart. Thus this new urban middle class built an identity around historical preservation, architecture, neighborhoods, authenticity, and individuality.

To be sure, practical considerations, like proximity to Manhattan business districts and access to public transit, are part of what attracted the brownstoners to certain neighborhoods. It's possible that if somehow those same areas contained early 20th century homes I'd be talking about nostalgia for the 1920s instead.

But the fact is, large portions of New York were built in the mid 19th century during an era of rapid growth for the city. This perhaps connects back to your example of Disney's Main Street USA. The mid 19th century was when the US industrialized, became a premier destination for immigrants, grew wealthy and expanded its settlements westward. Many towns across the middle of the country probably mark their founding in this era, which I think gives it a certain place in American popular memory. It's when some images that lend themselves nicely to nostalgia were formed or, in the case of brownstone New York, literally constructed.

None of this helps answer your broader question about this same trend outside the US, or whether there's an academic consensus on the matter, which I'd be very interested to learn about myself.