Hard disagree. In fact, I'd argue that things like these are an entirely modern phenomenon, and constitute a willful rejection of accumulated knowledge, and an attempt to construct non-mechanistic, idealistic view of the world. Why? A reaction to prevailing materialist paradigm, most likely for the reasons of mortality salience. It's not something confined to either Eastern Orthodoxy, or Eastern Europe. In fact, most of that anti-science crap is imported into Orthodoxy from American Protestantism (where it's a feature, not a bug, given their belief in inerrancy of the Scripture), it just gels well with Orthodox Savonarolas, of which there are no small numbers around.

We might characterize Medieval people as "superstitious" but they were not, what they believed was entirely within the prevailing scientific paradigm and level of scientific knowledge that existed back then. Even during the Early Modern period, people were still believing in various nonsensical stuff, and attempted to describe them "scientifically." I remember reading one treatise on vampires, which went in depth into "scientific" theory of how they function. Of course, even today science is a process, what was accepted as a correct explanation yesterday may be discovered to be an entirely wrong explanation tomorrow, once more facts are revealed.