I also think that this is the central cause of a wide variety of domestic/cute adaptations. There are too many separate features to believe that raccoons and dogs and cats and a dozen other species all select for these same elements independently.

I no longer have the book on hand, but read a few months ago that this correlation between juvenile traits and domestication was one of the main theses of Barrett's "Supernormal Stimuli" in Chapter 4. She cited a few studies of fox domestication [1], [2] and other works to support these theories.

[1]: https://courses.washington.edu/anmind/Trut%20on%20the%20Russ...

[2] https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(05)...