Impact on the promotion of such an online store catalog structure?

Question

Search Engine Optimization

Good day!
There is a product catalog. type:
|- Category
|-- Subcategory (Product)
|--- Product (Variation)
I.e. variations act as separate products, and the product is a subcategory.
Question: How much does such a hierarchy affect search engine promotion? Will there be an issue with duplication of content in such a case (the descriptions of our "variations", which technical goods are the same)?
Possible questions for me: why not redo the structure?
a) It is convenient to display the product group as a category (variations differ in appearance, but this is a key factor), and not as a dropdown of variations (when a head-to-head comparison is impossible, because the picture of the variation is pulled up when choosing the variation itself);
b) This structure is used in the customer's inventory control program. You can write a converter / parser, but point a).

Answer 1

Above they wrote about a clearly negative impact, but this is not entirely true.
Look at the market leaders (Wildberries, for example) - they successfully deliver different colors of clothes to different URLs. But pay attention to how it is implemented - for users it looks like just a color change (the URL changes, but without reloading the page).
M.Video, Svyaznoy quite successfully spread the same phone models on different pages depending on the color, this can be seen from ordinary iPhones.
At the same time, I would not abuse such crushing of goods. On a young site, a large number of monotonous pages can really be perceived as duplication of content. All the same, M.Video, Svyaznoy, Wildberries are large and trusted sites.
In Yandex.Webmaster, by the way, you can track indexing. Now, when a page is removed from the index, the reason is indicated there. If such groups of similar products are thrown out of the index, it will be noticeable immediately.

Answer 2

What does product variation mean? Is it the color, size?
If yes, then it's just duplicate content. Accordingly, it is perceived by search engines very negatively.