Most romance tropes can be boiled down workarounds to society-mandated limits, to be honest. I mean, it's a mistake to read any single genre through a single model and I don't think every Romance novel written for women by women can be modeled under this either, but to assume these tropes are popular because women just couldnt' imagine anything else or weren't capable of anything else is functionally insane.

The thing that I think does make this a wroking model is Romance novels have continued to use distilled versions of these tropes while updating; a sane person would not say Jude Deveraux RapeLoveYay!Novels are at all equivalent to Loretta Chase's NoRapeYay!Novels, except if I broke them by trope, perfect equivalent. Okay, Loretta is also a better writer. But how women view society has changed, and Romance novels are social-cultural barometers. They weren't created to Imagine a Better World, or Look, One Day You Can Do This, they were created to talk about what is happening right now, with is invaluable in itself.

(This is a vast, vast generalization of Romance, which itself is a catch-all for "things women like", since a lot of what is labeled as Romance especially in the last ten years has no trope affiliation, but whatever, that's an argument for another day about women and how they're treated by genre.)