I think a problem with my line of reasoning is that, as a society, we don't really want to care about the objective measures. I don't pick sides in this argumen

I think a problem with my line of reasoning is that, as a society, we don't really want to care about the objective measures. I don't pick sides in this argument, but there is an ongoing argument about things like "women have a lower population standard deviation in intelligence, so we'd expect them to be underrepresented in high-demand fields like software engineering, and low-demand fields like <politely left blank>", and the other side (ignoring those who doubt the empirical basis) just say "who cares? as a society we ought to treat people equally regardless of the hand they were dealt". That being said, I think your analysis is correct. I think, if you removed a lot of the technology-based attractiveness (make-up, haircut etc.), attractiveness is probably just a heuristic for genetic or general health. Of course, this is an empirical statement, so I imagine it is something that could be/has been studied, I was more commenting on the fact that the article totally ignores this thinking.