Memes

No, they are biologically real, despite it being obsolete nomenclature iirc. Alpha doesn't equate to "good" though. Just dominance.They exist in most if not all tournament species, but not so much in pair bonding apecies.

You can determine what category species fall under just by looking at average size differences of male and female skulls/other bone.

This provides a ton of information about mating habits, intersexual aggression, likelyhood of infidelity, role of males in raising kids and whole lot more.

Humans are in am evolutionary transition period from tournament to pair bonding.

All that being said, the traits selected to determine alphas can be about aggression and dominance and they can be about beauty, collaboration and territorial. Thia gets complex in birds and primates.

Alao, whatever strategy has the best chances of successfully reproducing and surviving through time does not automagically become legitimate, valuable or desireable. You need an extra ingredient for that. Priorities, which require value.

Most people can pull a trigger.

To add onto that, the guy that originally published the "alpha male" study spent a lot of time trying to correct public views and publish corrective studies because he discovered the behavior was only in wolves kept in captivity. IIRC.

It's kind of a thing in certain animals, but not wolves like originally claimed. The certain animals here being mostly primates, so it's even more applicable.

That said, the politics of social primates are notoriously complex and many cultures have unique behaviors within the species, so there aren't really any universal rules particularly among the most social groups.