That's not the case in poker. If someone thinks a novice player is messing them up somehow with poor play, it means they're not a good player either. A good poker player wants their opponents to play as poorly as possible.
Sure, I'm more likely to beat the person that is going all in with a 2 5 off suit but bad beats are incredibly annoying. Over time, in a sit and go situation I'd beat that player, but online and in tournament play I found that was a hazard. I'll take a consistent bad player over a complete novice any day.
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.
It doesn't mean you were a bad player, but it sounds like you might have been avoiding some potentially +EV situations due to lack of comfort with trickier opponents/situations. That's fair enough if it worked for you--it's not at all necessary to play every situation perfectly to have a healthy win rate. Towards the end of my poker career I was playing mostly heads-up, which teaches you to be pretty fearless about exploiting any and every edge, and to get comfortable with aggression. But there was a point in my progression where I'd get thrown off as well. And even after I felt like I was pretty damn good, I knew players who were clearly head and shoulders above me, so it's all relative.
When someone just consistently plays bad, that's the ideal situation.
Even your more moderate point you’d rather not have them in the game is totally wrong.
In reality, every professional player loves players who do terrible, random things. Variance might go up, but variance is going to be annoying either way. Other players doing dumb things is where your EV comes from. I’ve only ever heard complaints about crazy players being a hassle from inexperienced amateurs who dabble. Pros want “live ones” in their games.
An actually strong player won’t have that problem.
Disclaimer: chess novice, don't know anything about poker.
An expert playing against beginners might 'lose' 50% of the hands they get involved in still, and make a ton more money on the ones they win. It's the difference between an average of 5 big blinds / hr, and 50 big blinds / hr.
I'm not an expert by the way, I just consider myself an 'advanced beginner', who can count on making $2-4 / hr playing 1/2 no limit at the casino (based on having played maybe 200 hrs of poker in the casino). Not worth it as a way to make money, and I stopped caring enough about poker to invest the time to become better.
But you can see the entire dynamic at a table change when a loose, novice player sits down. Players no longer play against each other as much because they can count on the loose player to raise the stakes, and they're much more likely to capitalize on that.
I once played 1/2 NL uncapped at a casino, a guy sat down and put $1000 on the table. Every other hand he would raise $25-50 preflop, and call re-raises. Got all in pre-flop and pre-turn a bunch of times, every time he bust he put another $1000 on the table. This is exactly the best player to play with. Yes, you have to sit and wait for good cards before getting involved, but if you get something good, you have very good odds of stacking them.