There are two classes of tropes for me: the ones which serve as actual building blocks of worldbuilding and storytelling, and the ones which are cultural biases.
The former are just the usual patterns retold throughout history, like the hero's journey. They can seem boring, but it's because they are generic and need to be localized to the fictional world or a culture's mythology. Arguably, the way we identify these involves bias, eg. the hero's journey is mostly based on Indo-European mythology. But I hope my point can still be made.
The latter category are the tropes informed by biases. Or to put it another way, when you can create any possible world or write whatever story, why is it just medieval Anglo shit over and over? Ever notice how most fantasy maps are left-justified? Even hard worldbuilders who do all that meteorological calculation shit can't perceive a linguistic reality beyond the European sprachbund.
It's like learning the etymology of a word. Sometimes you find out the way we use words today is very weird, and we shouldn't assume it applies across all time and traditions ("man" used to be gender neutral, for example). Except some core words eg. "to be," "to go," "to come" are relatively very stable.
