I think your definition of popular is holding you back. If popular just means other people like you, you’re obviously wrong- plenty of people are very successful even though they are disliked. Often this will happen multiple times on a single team at a company. If popular means you’re perceived as valuable, you’re obviously right. All institutions are social institutions and operate on social understandings of value. So to be successful you have to be perceived as valuable by these social structures. I think calling this a scam misunderstands the non-quantitative metrics of worth. There isn’t actually a Best Academic, a Best Engineer, or a Best Coworker in some measurable objective sense. Those are all social evaluations and they’re valuable because of that, not despite it