Popularity Food Chain: Index used as trope?

Popularity Food Chain is an index of 'popular kids' and 'unpopular kids'. However it has wicks from some works that treat it as a trope about the popularity hierarchy in schools:

• The Disastrous Life of Saiki K.: Teruhashi and Hairo are at the top, and Nendou and Kaidou are near the bottom. Saiki is aware of said food chain and has a power that tells him where he currently stands on it; he consciously makes an effort to stay somewhere in the middle (too popular and he'll start to stand out, too unpopular and people will mistreat him).
• The Torkelsons: It's often brought up by Dorothy Jane how bad she feels about not being in the popular crowd, and how much she want to be more liked by her peers. In Season 1, her outsider status is mostly brought on by her family's poverty. In Season 2, she is contrasted sharply with Molly, who is in the popular crowd at school.

And others that pothole it in sentences talking about the popularity hierarchy:

• 21 Jump Street: Deliberate Values Dissonance: Jenko finds out the hard way that, in the age of Glee, environmentalism, and a more pro-tolerance atmosphere, his alpha-male jock routine puts him a lot lower on the Popularity Food Chain than it did in the early-mid 2000s...
• Characters.Degrassi The Next Generation Season 11 Graduates:...her family runs into financial troubles, which causes Holly J to fall to the bottom of the Popularity Food Chain...

Can indexes be used as tropes in this way? Should the listings that use it as a trope entry be removed?

"Popularity food chain exists as a social setting" sounds like a trope to me. However, that would need a TLP on its own.

Absurdly Divided School?

And yeah, indexes can't be used as tropes.

I'm thinking of not limiting it to school settings, as the examples brought by the OP shows.

The four examples are actually all in school settings, though; I just cut out some context.