>Sure, playing correctly against a maniac, novice, or otherwise unpredictable player can be more difficult and have higher variance, it's also as lucrative as it gets if you know what you're doing. All the strong players I've known would be elated to play against people like that.
I don't know about you, but when I was grinding, I didn't really want to increase variance. I wanted a stable mental state with low focus on multiple tables to maximize the rate of return over that period. I found that alterations in that caused me to play more loosely, which ended up leading to avoidable mistakes, magnified because I'm playing multiple tables at once.
The same thing was true for a tournament. There's a far more limited return from players like this, in part because you meet them early. It's a fact of the online game that people just go all in a lot especially in the beginning, but it ends up being a gauntlet you just need to get through. I wouldn't call them my ideal opponents; it's not what I prefer, it just exists.
Maybe I'm not what you would consider a strong player but I did win consistently enough to feed myself with it for a couple of years, mostly online before it became illegal. It wasn't really my experience that high risk high reward play was the way to go. Most of the people I played with worked to limit variance's effect on their game, not increase it.
Again though, that's just me - not the strongest player ever, you clearly have a different opinion about it. All good.