It’s important to realize that in a cult, whether it be a personality cult or religious, the imaginary caricature that they worship has little to do with why they are in it; it’s all about ego washing and pandering to themselves, sometimes in a sunk cost fallacy but plenty of times just simply because they’ve developed a dependency for the illusion to be there, justifying any deviations in reality as just being a deviation of their illusion which should remain forever pristine lest they risk their ego collapsing along with it.