George Packer labels the creepy phenomenon as a symptom of cultural despair:
That’s the nature of manufactured customs and instant traditions. They emerge from an atomized society in order to fill a perceived void where real ceremonies used to be, and they end by reflecting that society’s narcissism. Is it too much to say that gender-reveal parties are a mild symptom of cultural despair? A society that turns exercise into a sixty-minute communion with the sacred, or the choice of food into the highest expression of personal virtue, has probably lost faith in real change—the kind of change, for example, that might allow the staggering number of ex-felons to rejoin it with a degree of dignity.