[pataagusata]

I'm not sure I would extend the definition of superstition to cover everything from art to storytelling to the making of statues.

Not intrinsically, no. When used to propagate superstition, yes.

People in the pre-modern era were more at home with imaginative and mythopoeic forms of expression;
Perhaps so, largely because they did not have the kind of rational tools we have now to sort out fact from fiction. Although the Buddha was using some of the same tools we do now to do just that. He was way ahead of his time in that respect.

they did not feel themselves confined, as many of us moderns do, to a dreary literalism. Quite a presumptuous statement. But you have got it backwards: sorting out fact from superstition is liberating, not confining. We are not bound and gagged by scary stories and fear of what is not known.

And it's not as if the psychological needs which you mention have disappeared; rather, they've become fodder for the advertising industry. The advertising industry thrives on the same sort of ignorance and gullibility that drives superstition on despite the advances in rational thought that many of us enjoy.