Exactly.
As with anything, GIFT results in a few morons trying to be clever demonstrating their own ignorance, but as anyone who frequents the site will quickly point out, tropes are not cliches- but what they are is everywhere: Being surprised to find tropes in a work is like being surprised to find wheels on your car.
That's a good way to put it, actually: tropes are to a creative work what parts like a motor are to a vehicle: It can't function without them, and you have to understand them to actually build one yourself.
If the parts are poorly assembled or the wrong types are used, the result won't work. If the right parts are used and expertly assembled, you get an impressive result. There are an endless number of ways a vehicle can be designed- but generally you still have to have the same basic parts for a given type of vehicle to work properly. On the other hand, it's also completely possible to radically alter traditional parts, or invent new parts, or even create entirely new types of vehicle… but the resulting vehicle is still a combination of vehicle parts.
And to complete the metaphor, at the end of the day, the best way to learn to build your own vehicles is to deeply study existing vehicles: You examine how they are put together, and why and how the makers used a particular part for a particular purpose. You study what people have tried in the past that worked, and what didn't work. You look at new ways to use or improve existing parts, and get some ideas for things that haven't been done before. And once you have a deep understanding of how it all fits together, you're in a much better position to create something that will actually work.
That's what TVtropes is, basically: a place to learn how to build stories by taking stories apart to see what makes them tick.