I've thought a lot about this and I think beauty is both shorthand for "that looks like someone healthy and very functional" and also is something that can be faked, so it's not a reliable indicator.
For this reason, I think it will always be both valued and controversial. To whatever degree it genuinely signals something of underlying value, like health and competence, it's useful shorthand. To whatever degree it is a signal that is hackable, it's shorthand with a poor signal-to-noise ratio.
I don't think we will ever completely solve it. We will always be caught between those two facts.
> In 2018, evolutionary psychologist Mark van Vugt and his team at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam found evidence for the Napoleon complex in human males. Men of short stature behaved more (indirectly) aggressive in interactions with taller men. Their evolutionary psychology hypothesis argues that in competitive situations when males, human or nonhuman, receive cues that they are physically outcompeted, the Napoleon complex psychology kicks in: physically weaker males should adopt alternative behavioral strategies to level the playing field, including showing indirect aggression and coalition building.[10]
Of course these are generalities and you can find many exceptions, but the same is true of "managers tend to be taller"; that too is a generality with many exceptions.