I ask because while i know it is a popular trope, i have never experienced or seen it in my country, despite being the prototypical nerd and having grown up in a poor area.
I don't know if we're more enlightened now, or if we're simply more protective of, and involved in, every aspect of our children's lives. Either way, I doubt physical violence against nerds is as common as it may have been. Psychological violence, however, hasn't gone away. Bullying is alive and thriving in the US.
This means that there isn't much social ROI for bullying someone and so people are largely left to their own devices.
Regardless, even in this thread there are people who claim to be from small schools and have not experienced physical violence. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I do think it's far, far less common than Hollywood would have you believe.
I was brainy in school, but none of the axes that groups split on resembled the ones you see in the movies, so most of my friends weren't. No jocks vs nerds. Nobody was intimidated or otherwise pressured as a result of doing well in class. More often than not, people were likely to be down on themselves for feeling dumb or when they felt they weren't keeping up. The best predictor of clustering habits was usually outgoing vs timid, and then those in the middle. But mobility within those clusters meant that even those were pretty fluid.
The type of humor my class most valued was, if not intelligent, then at least quick. Contrary to what the article lays out, in my view, Matthew Perry's Chandler Bing is probably one of the biggest influences there.
Aside from standard relationship drama, most everybody in my class got along. I wore glasses for a year starting in 4th grade after I began getting headaches at the end of the day. Once shortly after getting my prescription, a classmate called me "four-eyes" after lunch, and I just laughed in his face. He'd really meant for that one to sting, and he was a lot tougher than me, but that just wasn't a thing.
Anti-intellectualism was something that I noticed became a big thing after 9/11, to the point that I found it genuinely alarming, but it showed up clearer in the world I was seeing than the one I was living. Thankfully, the insanity died down (at least from where I'm standing), but we have Idiocracy and American Dad as artifacts. I've tried referencing that era since then, but I have difficulty, especially in regards to using words to recreate the world at that time in order to have a conversation about exactly why something like Idiocracy was originally made. My family and acquaintances who lived through it seem to just see the last 20 years as one homogeneous blur. "Shit was crazy" is what I've resigned myself using and is how I described it a few weeks ago to a friend of mine from Iraq.
After I'd graduated and moved out of state for school, I read a longform article about the death of irony that I thought was on-point in describing the world I grew up in vs the world I saw on TV growing up, but it's none of the ones that show up when I search for it now. The best and most direct treatment of the topic that I've seen since then is in the scene in 21 Jump Street when Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum first run into Dave Franco and his friends on the first day of their assignment (even though they fudged the timeline a bit).
My high school graduating class was something like 40 people, and I graduated in 2007. This all happened in a public school in a small town in North Texas (Collinsville).
I was fairly sure that my hometown wasn't special and this was just the way the world worked now, compared to the sitcom holdovers. Went to the University of Oklahoma (it's ranked first in National Merit Scholar enrollments for a public university, and they give out lots of money). Freshman year I was mostly weirded the fuck out, especially by the other people on my floor in my dorm and in the CS program. ("This isn't how people act in real life anymore, right? Nobody really buys into these tropes, do they?") Ended up having a pretty bad time there for as long as I stayed, and I left less sure about how the much the world differed from TV after all. I'm in neither Oklahoma nor North Texas anymore. What I've seen since suggests that Norman, Oklahoma is an anomaly; every now and then I'll meet someone with the same alma mater and the weirdness comes back. As far as predictors go, that has turned out to be a pretty good one for whether I'll be able to get along with someone or be totally at a loss for how to interact and connect with them. (Some false positives about whether someone will pass, but zero false negatives so far, unfortunately.)
The vast, vast majority of violence that happened at my school (and we had a fair amount) was between unpopular, non-nerdy kids with homelife problems.
Physical violence was mostly between the bullies/"bad kids".
While I was nerdy, these things happened more because of differences of ethnicity than anything else.
When I left NYC I met someone who claimed that he had "never been punched" and I thought that was the craziest statement I had ever heard.
I am near two high schools in downtown Oakland and I have seen only 1 fight in the past 2 years. I think that today's kids are much less prone to violence even in the rougher neighborhoods and adults are much more likely to intervene.
People draw the line at different points. Some might consider the shoving that happened frequently to me one year something far worse than what I considered it to be (frustrating and annoying, but not causing me any anxiety for fear that it'd happen again, I knew it'd happen again, but I didn't have panic attacks about it).
Same in India as well.
Also, no, it didn't matter who started the fight. If you were involved then you were equal and disciplined the same. It's ridiculously backwards
The teachers naturally will "like" the talented social sociopath, so they forgive and don't punish their transgressions against the weak.
[edit] I guess I didn't see too much actual violent fighting otherwise beyond (I guess) normal making fun of / pushing around of nerds, although I did see a few fights between girls and some involving more metalhead/burnout types (in case anyone is familiar with the John Hughes High Schooler taxonomy)
Edit: to add this perspective though, my wife went to school in a relatively small town (Rolla, MO) and also had a 400 or so graduating class, but she claims ignorance of any sort of nerd bullying and thought it was a TV trope only thing too. She graduated in 2002. Maybe something changed between those dates?
Admittedly, it was unrepresentative in other ways: one third Ashkenazi Jewish, one third Persian Jewish, one third mostly-white-and-Asian other, very high population of affluent immigrants. We were plugged in to American pop culture, but I think we were isolated in some senses. Little to no idolization of the sports teams, for example.