This is also roughly my experience. In my country people are taught continuous cursive in primary school. On average the more intelligent ones stop using it by themselves once they are around 12-14.
Cursive can look beautiful if written by a master, but usually it just looks like a child's handwriting.
Writing cursive would absolutely distract me from thinking, and I'm under the impression that this holds for most people.
The type of cursive taught in American schools is a pretty awful writing system and does require a lot of skill to produce legible script. However, there is another type of cursive that's significantly faster than printing, but it's also very easy to produce legible writing because it's essentially just connected printing. It's cursive Italic.
I think it's more about the fact that today for writing we mostly use pencils and ballpoint pens, and not fountain pens (or feathers) anymore. With fountain pen italic connected cursive is the most natural way to write quickly and cleanly. Writing in block letters with fountain pen is hard, as the tip of the pen goes up or hits the paper on the way down it will leave drops of ink that are very easy to turn into a huge mess. That's why with it you need to be careful and try to write in a continuous movement. With ballpoint pen or ordinary pencil you don't care about the flow of the ink, you can raise and lower the tip anyway you like, hit the paper under any angle, so we all turned into writing the lazy, easier-to-read-afterwords way: using block letters.
Cursive can look beautiful if written by a master, but usually it just looks like a child's handwriting.
Writing cursive would absolutely distract me from thinking, and I'm under the impression that this holds for most people.