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In the course of deconstructing the argument, you have thrown out whatever meaning there was to its constituent words.
At the risk of sounding pedantic, I believe the original thesis refers to some combination of Darwinism and Turchin's overproduction of elites. It entirely embraces your claim that weak men love to have a good time. Surprise, everyone does. And your «strong men» of the bodybuilders-on-horseback mold are a bugbear, a mirage, a nightmare of confused Hollywood producers and Bay Area rationalists and wannabe "dark elves" – they do not matter and do not last, they are but foam cresting waves of history.
Is Putin a weak man? Are folks on Rublyovka weak, or their children in Western capitals? They've delivered a pretty hard time for everyone, but they sure love to live large. And what about the self-satisfied rich of the developing world, that @2rafa discusses? Are they dedicated to making the whole system more amenable to thriving, or do they find it easy to insulate their kin from the wretched masses and keep having a good time, for their time?
The adage is almost nonsense, but so is your perspective.
I'd say that good men create good times. Good men like the memorable LKY. Good in that they care at all about what happens outside their circle of immediate concern, and strong enough to make hard decisions; which some mistake for them being bad.
In good times, this error becomes more pervasive, as social mobility reaches certain sophistication and a subclass of (some would say, overproduced) elites discovers the utility of playing up those decisions' costs.
Something like this.
You're absolutely right that the body-builder on horseback/Chad Squarejaw meme is a mirage. That is not a strong man, that is a weak man's caricature of a strong man. The strongest and most terrifying of men often come across as unassuming precisely because they are sufficiently self-possessed and confident in themselves, that they don't feel a need to actively project that image.
And yes good men create good times. But good men are rarely reasonable because having principals and caring about people/things outside one's circle of immediate concern is utterly irrational in the conventional sense of the word.
Building on this, I saw no recognition by the OP of the distinctions between types of strength, or even the distinction between power and strength. Weak leaders can have much power, and use the power of their position / context / brute force to paper over their weaknesses against those with less power.
Moreover, the 'strong men are where the survivors are dominant' easily misses that Darwinian selection doesn't select for strength, it selects for survival. Survival only correlates with strength when the selection force is targetting weakness- but it often doesn't. Wars will kill the brave and the selfless first, while cowards who flee live. Purges will select for those with the strength of the (wrong) conviction, but spare the sophists or the deceitful. Darwinian survival isn't survival of the best, it's the propagation of those most likely to multiply. Calling those features 'fitness' is assuming the conclusion.
I think an underestimated component of this is that physical strength/survivability is often down-stream of mental strength/survivability. As the old saw goes, a lot of guys want to be swole, but few have the discipline to eat right, lift weights, and do so with consistency.
Physical strength isn't much good to a doormat, and mental fortitude/astuteness can absolve numerous physical faults, the old Dashiel Hammet bit about how "Guzman didn't move fast, but then then again Guzman never needed to move all that fast because he'd seen you coming from six blocks away" comes to mind.
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Agreed, and perhaps a simpler illustration is: why isn't everyone 7ft tall? Sometimes it pays off to be the small guy who just doesn't need to eat very much.
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