Same products, canonical and SEO?

Question

Search Engine Optimization

Hello.
There is an IM that needs to be optimized while it is under development.
The store is supposed to be promoted in the midrange, and its structure suggests something like this:
Main -> catalog -> subcatalog -> 10 products
The subcatalog is planned to be promoted.
And the setting of goods remains a bit incomprehensible.
Yes, I would understand if these were things with labels that the user can enter into the search.
But the names of the goods are fictitious (product 1, product 2, product 3 - the only difference is the number), and the descriptions of the goods are 80 percent the same (product 1 is a hare made of wood, product 2 is a cat made of wood, product 3 is a fox made of wood - conditional descriptions for understanding texts ).
Only images that are unique for each product differ.
Hence a number of questions:
1) How to focus more weight on a subdirectory?
Now there are 2 links from the page of each product to the subcatalog page: in breadcrumbs and in the description text.
Is this correct from an SEO point of view and how to give more weight to the subdirectory?
Maybe it's worth making the subdirectory the main page for all products through the rel="canonical" attribute?
Or close all links to products from indexing so that the subdirectory page does not distribute its "weight"?
2) Or can it combine all products into one through the same rel="canonical" attribute?
Theoretically, then they will not be duplicates of themselves, but the user will be able to click on them in the directory.
Then it turns out that the subdirectory refers to 10 duplicates of one page,
3) You can, of course, uniqueize the page of each product by adding tons of unnecessary, but unique text.
Is it worth it? Is this option better than the previous two?
PS Competitors in the top do not implement any of the above options, and product descriptions are similarly not complete duplicates of each other.

Answer 1

Maybe it's worth making the subdirectory the main page for all products through the rel="canonical" attribute?

definitely not, it will end very sadly
maybe if the content is really identical. But I would simply not make different pages for such products. I would make the differences options and make the image dependent on them. Like when there is only one product, but there are many colors - blue underpants, red underpants, etc. This is 1 item.