This feels like a stone's throw from Schenkerian analysis (1) where in practice, lots of harmonies devolve to a simple foundational structure. Even the tough stuff to reason about like the example at the bottom of the page, Gee, Officer Krupke which is tricky because of the jazz/ragtime influence on the chromaticism of the harmony and melody basically reduces down to leading tone resolution and local key changes (V-I resolutions). It's setting up the zingers like "naturally we're punks" (V-I), "deep down inside of us there is good" (V-I) coming from chromatic turnarounds.
I recently figured out the chords to "Sk8er Boi" by Avril Lavigne. It would be all over the place in the analysis in this article, but it's because the chorus is in a different key, and the out of key chord in the verse is actually borrowed from the chorus. It's surprising clever for what I assumed was an easy pop punk song. There was even some word painting with the line "She needed to come back down to earth" coming right before the key drop going into the verse.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenkerian_analysis