One, I don't think it was ever implied that the cult members are the town's "elite," exactly. Just people who've been there for a long time, and who are invested in the town's prosperity to the point of madness. One of them I think even says that they're just people you've seen day-to-day, but not necessarily anyone you'd notice. While I think a dozen or so people disappearing from the town suddenly would be noticed, it's not necessarily the most important people in town. Also, the kid who goes missing that one night I believe was said to be a kid from out-of-town. They briefly mention where that kid was from, but I can't remember the name of the place off the top of my head.
As for the drifter and the chamber of commerce/city council people, I think the implication there was that because Pastor K was looking out for him, he wasn't someone that could just be abducted without anyone noticing. It's possible that one or more of the people from that group was part of the cult, but that's never explained in detail. Their reasons for not wanting him around could have been taken at face value, or maybe there was something more sinister there.
I also disagree that the last scene somehow renders the previous events unimportant. The four friends end up experiencing something very strange, something that nobody else in town seemingly knows about. It's a device to kind of bind them together at the end, but I think it also speaks to one of the game's main themes, which is about trying to recapture something long gone. For Mae, it's trying to restart her life in the town, and finding that difficult to achieve. On the larger scale, it's people literally sacrificing bodies out of some misguided desperation for recapturing a bygone era, and possibly out of pure superstition. It might be very on-the-nose, but for me, it vibed with what I took from the game's larger storytelling, and especially some of the more religious themes you get from the dream sequences and constellation mythology. And considering we live in a time when a large portion of the population more-or-less just displayed a similar willingness to sacrifice the rest of the country out of a similar desperation, the metaphor worked for me.
The fact that they are able to go back to a version of their old life after having that experience doesn't negate what came before. By the end, Mae has come to accept that as much as she might want to go back to something familiar, something remembered, nothing stays the same. Gregg and Angus are still going to move away at some point, Bea's got a different kind of life she's trying to build for herself. And Mae's going to have to find her way through all of that. Getting together for one last band practice at the end I think was a nice culmination of everything that came before, a last point of familiarity before embarking on an uncertain future.
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