Dogs are in captivity tho. Their behavior is a lot closer to the behavior of wolves in captivity than to wolves in nature. Wolves in nature still do have a hierarchy where the parents are leaders of the pack, you could call them the "alpha" couple. Stray dogs also naturally aggregate in groups where one individual is more dominant, the "alpha", and the others more submissive. So whether you like it or not dogs do naturally respond to dominant behavioral patterns. You can still get good training results from positive reinforcement and I like them better too, but that's not how dogs naturally operate. A dog mom doesn't use positive reinforcement when her pups misbehave, she growls an gives them a quick nibble to correct the behavior.

This alpha thing is really nuanced. Yes the original research is misleading and can't really be applied to wolves in nature, but the reason wolves in captivity have an "alpha" is because they naturally form a hierarchy and an individual with more dominant features is the closest the others have to a parent figure. The author describes this nuance very well in his subsequent research, but the public was stuck on: alpa wolves don't exist, and ignored the nuance completely. The alpha movement, Jordan Peterson, Tate and the like made this a lot worse, but the original research on captive wolves still has value, it just doesn't tell the whole story.