Here's a piece that I think you're missing: identity and status are related, but not equivalent.

Identity is about living up to a social standard or ideal for a role that defines your place in the tribe. Living up to "your" ideals (i.e., the tribe's standard for the role) produces good feelings.

Let's say that a tribe has hunters, gatherers, warriors, shamans, and healers. Each subgroup (subculture?) has a set of practices, sayings, beliefs, values, etc. that are unique to that subgroup role. In order for an individual to occupy a productive specialization, they have to learn (and be motivated to embody) these standards and practices.

Also notice that what's high-status behavior for each subgroup is different; behavior that's honored when done by a shaman would be laughed at (or worse) in a hunter.

Thus, we get the all-too-human phenomena of conforming non-conformists, status-seeking behavior by people who claim that all status is beneath them, etc.

So, I think you're on the right general track, but missing a more specific mechanism that more closely explains why this type of behavior is rewarded. It's not status-seeking per se, it's "living up to ideals". Conspiracy theorists are emulating the ideal of a revolutionary truthseeker... and so, perhaps are most of us here. ;-)

Thing is, it's not the specific behaviors or results that are rewarded by this mechanism; it's attitudes, emotions, and other fuzzy stuff like that. So, you can be a really fuzzy thinker and still pride yourself on being a brilliant seeker of truth... in attitude. (Presumably, in the ancestral environment, your actual skill calibration would occur via real-world feedback and the not-so-gentle correction of your peers or mentors; but the motivation to persist in the learning would come via the pride-of-identity mechanism.)

Priming research, btw, shows that when we're reminded of the subgroups we belong to, our behaviors tend to conform to ideals or stereotypes of those subgroups -- IOW, identity, not status, is the key to stereotypical behavior. (And incidentally, it's a mild refutation of the idea that status needs drive everything. Human beings do have other motivators.)