How much of the 10 years parks plan will suffer though?
Accountant here. Fixed assets (like ride construction, buildings, etc) is one of my main areas of focus. My guess is no, and here's why.
There's a couple of differences between the 2000s recession and now, the biggest being that Disney as a company is much, much bigger. Between 2009 and 2018, Disney's growth was dramatic. Larger companies are more able to weather recessions.
Second is leadership. During the Eisner era, Eisner was not willing to spend money, especially on the parks. Looking back, to me, this made him ineffective as a leader because he looked more towards short term results than long term goals. He was definitely not looking at long-term plans, and this reflected in the parks. This was reflected later in the parks; DCA they didn't know how to fix, so they threw a cheaper ToT there. AK got the pre-made carnival rides. WDW basically got Soarin' and Expedition Everest as the only major additions between 2000 and 2010. Iger, when he took over, definitely took them as a company willing to spend money and invest, even if we largely didn't see this impact at WDW. As a result, the company mindset has changed from one of "how can we make profits this quarter" to "how can we ensure we're growing". This kind of stagnated with Chapek, but the projects announced show that they're switching strategies. To me, seeing construction stop is the result of a panicked leader worried about the immediate bottom line instead of long-term goals.
Disney has to do a lot of planning for these projects financially, including how to get investment funding, cost scenarios, etc. Because of the thing we all hate, paid Lightning Lanes, Disney can also prove directly how much a ride is making. They can estimate how much it will drive up attendance, but also how many more lightning lanes they can sell. Gives them more of an estimate on payback periods, even though we as guests most definitely hate it. The only thing I would expect to cancel these projects is if costs significantly increase, but not for projects where ground is already broken. I can pretty much guarantee they also have contingency plans, like for Villains land (this is what we can do in scenario A, scenario B, etc).
A lot of projects during covid were cancelled, but Covid is basically an anomaly year*. For any business, what happened during the should not be used as a basis for the future; it was wayyyy out of the realm of normal. We did get cancelled and delayed projects, but existing projects had delays because of shutdowns and supply chain issues, and then they ultimately cost more because we just saw substantial cost increases overall during those years. Hence why Epcot didn't get everything promised; revenue streams were down, costs were up...it was just chaos. But the projects that were cancelled were the ones that hadn' started construction.
So the answer... basically I'd expect anything officially announced to continue, although for Villains Land, I think they don't officially know what attractions are being done and are waiting until closer to the date to announce exact details. But since they are doing initial work, it's not getting cancelled entirely. I do not expect what happened in the 2000s to repeat with the stagnation in construction because of the changes in leadership and because of Disney's larger size. At most, if revenue suffers, some projects might get delayed, but I don't really expect that either based on recent attendance. I'd expect to see more of an impact on day-to-day operations than long-term goals.
*Note that this includes businesses that had increased during Covid. Also an anomaly. JoAnne's is the latest example of a business that saw an uptick, got overconfident, and went kaputt.
