Does twisting your products together really make a big difference?

I’m a content manager for my e-commerce toy company. Before I arrived, we had a huge reliance on twisting (variating) products together to improve sales instead of optimizing the content on the PDP. My instinct is to only variate based on size and color within a brand, but my company often twists low sellers with high sellers to get more sales so long as they’re the same brand.

Is twisting an effective strategy for long-term sales, or could it end up hurting or even hiding products from the browse node?