Western society's conception of adulthood is steeped in toxic masculinity, careerism, neoliberal individualism, and social conformity. "Man up." "Be normal." "Don't be colorful." "You're too old to play pretend." "Buy a house." "You'll understand [my conservative bullshit] when you're older."
What we actually understood as we got older was that the older generation had no business telling us what was and wasn't mature. We've seen these Good, Respectable, Normal People support bombing villagers on the other side of the planet. We've seen them support racial profiling, indefinite detentions, and torture facilities. We've seen them crash the economy chasing the idea that everyone must own a house. We've seen the wretched job market we graduated into after being told that graduating college would secure us a good career. We've seen companies squeeze us dry and then lay us off after we'd been told "work hard and you'll get rewarded." We've seen them destroy the biosphere because they couldn't tell the difference between weather and climate. We've seen them throw a collective fit over wearing masks to inhibit the spread of a deadly pandemic. We've seen them endlessly parrot "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" as every aspect of our lives grows increasingly surveilled by a state that's hostile to our existence. We've seen neurodiverse and LGBT friends who only found true happiness when they embraced the parts of themselves that others demanded they outgrow.
Given all that, unashamedly enjoying and displaying cute aesthetics can feel a lot like a middle finger to the people who demanded we grow into the most drab, joyless existence imaginable and turned out to be full of shit about everything else.
And no, before anyone tries to claim this is what I'm saying, this doesn't mean I think that buying Marvel Funko Pops is anti-capitalist praxis. 
"Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself."
It's a big part of what attracted me to art nouveau in the 2000s. The boomer aesthetic in that period was "wot if I lived in a Tuscan villa?" while the younger generations were just starting to develop millennial grey. Bright, colourful, natural, de-commodified art was extremely out of fashion. Either it was orientalist hippie shit or hipster bohemian/neo-Great Depression shit, but nothing authentic/organic/honest. The aesthetics of toxic masculinity were so obnoxious even if I didn't know the term to categorise them under, especially in the post-9/11 jingoism and gangsta rap era.
With art nouveau I had a good counterweight to all the right-modernist and postmodernist things I hated. My own art style took after games like Taiko Drum Master with bright pastel colours and cute, simple faces for the same reason, but the art I wanted to be surrounded with was what the system couldn't produce since WW1. Everything between 1920 and the late 2000s was coming from the World War/Cold War generations to venerate the industrial right-modernism that won those wars or get people excited for WW3. The available counterculture options were all silly and corporate by then. There wasn't anything that celebrated labour and nature right when anti-environmentalism was the dominant cultural narrative and workers were facing alienation so extreme that it created a generational psychic shift away from the American Dream. I could be a heterosexual man worshipping flowers through 2000 year-old mosaic techniques that an artisan spent real time on. That was subversive against the entire past century.
Art nouveau is so sick.
It's the cultural language of surviving climate change degrowth. We need something that centres nature and organic human labour, solidifies community, and provides enriching local work. Art nouveau would have become 19th century solarpunk if the 20th century wasn't framed by oil and WW1. There's an extremely radical lost future in that which answers Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction right as we need to most. Reclaiming that tradition is how we counter industrialism, commodification, technofuturism/AI, postmodernism, and right-urbanism in one movement.
Contemporary public art is so fucking lame compared to what art nouveau-nouveau could achieve. I want to melt Chicago's spiritually-draining bean and replace it with a cathedral to the meadows that Illinois paved over. When people walk through that free thing and the height of beauty is organic curves and native wildflowers rendered in native materials, their obvious next question is why are they otherwise surrounded by straight concrete/plastic lines and can't see wildflowers. Capitalism has spent the subsequent century only offering straighter lines, more hyperreality, and fewer wildflowers. Its fundamental sociocultural death drive is toward those things that art nouveau specifically counters.