I don't remember doing a search for "metaphor" before, but anyway...

https://www.academymuseum.org/en/programs/detail/the-incredible-shrinking-man-0185991e-8aa4-2000-0aaa-77e791fe1d90

OK, so it's from last year.

Quote:

"After a radioactive fog descends upon a couple while boating, Scott Carey (Grant Williams) starts to notice he’s getting smaller. When medical experts confirm he is shrinking, his life is upended as he adjusts to his miniscule new reality. Using state-of-the-art special effects and maintaining the terror of Richard Matheson’s 1956 novel, this science fiction classic uses the metaphor of diminished size to analyze the decreasing influence of masculinity in 1950s American society..."

And, more importantly:

https://durnmoosemovies.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/when-science-and-philosophy-both-go-awry-the-incredible-shrinking-man-1957/

April 9, 2013 ~ Michael Laws
"In talking about the 1957 version of The Incredible Shrinking Man, which I recently had a chance to give a big-screen revisit thanks to its inclusion as part of Universal’s 100 Anniversary re-release celebration, Richard Matheson, who not only wrote the novel that it’s based on but adapted (along with Richard Alan Simmons) the novel for the screen, has said 'My original story was a metaphor for how man’s place in the world was diminishing. That still holds today, where all these advancements that are going to save us will be our undoing.' Perhaps that explains the reasoning behind the seemingly somewhat out of nowhere soliloquy at the end of the movie, but it also points out why, in the end, that last bit of voice-over just didn’t work for me."

(The rest of the essay is loaded with spoilers.)

And:

https://scifist.net/2023/08/20/the-incredible-shrinking-man/

This is about the movie and gender roles.

I also stumbled on this - it's from a religious website (but there's no reference to the movie):

https://www.thetrumpet.com/10305-the-incredible-shrinking-man

Quote:

....It’s a proven, demonstrable aftereffect: In areas where they compete, women’s success tends to discourage men. You can attribute this to chauvinism, sexist indoctrination or whatever you would like, but it is real, and it is powerful. “What happens when women outperform men?” asked Sandy Hingston in Philadelphia Magazine. “Men withdraw from the field” (March 2012). Once they see that women are providing for themselves, they lose interest in taking over that job.

“Gender identity, sociologists say, is developed oppositionally,” Hingston wrote. “If boys see girls behaving in a certain way—working hard and excelling in school—they define masculinity in opposite terms: A real man doesn’t work hard at school or get good grades.”

This effect is apparent throughout the workforce. As women enter a profession, men lose interest in it. As Rosin details in her book, men are abandoning more and more jobs while women rush in to fill the void. Women’s options for employment keep expanding as men surrender them.

The upshot of all this, Rosin says, is “the emergence of an American matriarchy, where the younger men especially are unmoored,and closer than at any other time in history to being obsolete—at least by most traditional measures of social utility. And the women are left picking up the pieces.”...