I think you’re just noticing and responding to assertiveness. Hence bringing up the alpha beta stuff.

Imo confidence is definitely one of those things where you can fake it til you make it. But assertiveness looks bad if it’s not authentic. Mark Zuckerburg comes to mind and I think might be an element to why he is so widely disliked. This quote from the movie from his ex girlfriend comes to mind: “You’re gonna go through life thinking girls don't like you because you're a nerd, but I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole”. I think it’s a lack of assertiveness, not confidence, that informs his behavior and his decisions and makes him an unlikable person (having never met him in person of course and simply going off public perception). On the contrary, I think he is a very confident person.

There are people that I’ve met who initially I read as kind of… confidently boring, if you will. But I think what makes them so interesting and “stand out” is not an overbearing sense of assertiveness, but a security in the levels of assertiveness that they do possess. There’s a lot of respect to be had for someone who knows themselves and refuses to let themselves be diminished simply because they may not want to take the lead in every situation or don’t mind fading into the background. Being an attention hog and saying “me, me, me!” is not assertiveness in and of itself. Being an asshole =/= being assertive. Being rich and literally being able to afford to “not care” does not equal assertiveness.

Of course saying all this, I don’t think assertiveness is static. I would say it is innate though so to an extent can’t be “learned”. Cursory searches on the subject link it to self esteem. If you lack self esteem due to being mistreated during early child development, I think it would be unrealistic and unfair to say you couldn’t develop a healthier self esteem and thus assertiveness later in life. Otherwise no victim of abuse would ever recover anywhere and that’s just not true. Humans are very resilient.

On another note, I think you would do well to distinguish between dominance and assertiveness/confidence. Imo one can be incredibly confident, have a healthy sense of assertiveness, a well-adjusted personality and still be very non-dominant.