Salacious! But not snake oil.
The virtuous congru of opposing link structures. No telling how many cycles it will give. Possibly works best with some external input, to help it along.
Smells like enterprise SEO...
Oh, the horror! Big box using money sites like PBNs. If you have a gander in the wild, they probably hide in plain site.
LOL. Never used a PBN on an enterprise site, but link buys - absolutely. You'd be shocked at the mega sites you can buy contextual links on. I had a 5 figure budget! I bought some individual links for $2500, and holy crap are they worth it.
I have discovered reputable, well known competitors using what looked like SAPE links on tier 2. Word around the campfire is that there are a lot of big brands that cheat, but they've got the budget and savvy to avoid penalties. You're not going to get penalized for buying links on a site like nytimes.com (I didn't buy from them, but equivalents). Plus, if you've got a trust flow over 60 you can get away with murder. Google has definitely stacked the deck in favor of big brands. SEOs at major brands don't worry about negative SEO. If you're a brand, you could get bombed with negative links, and Google will ignore it.
I just started a new gig, and for the first time in my SEO career back links are not the problem. The site's TF/CF is 58/52 and is 100% natural. Our company is used as the backdrop for a number of reality TV shows including 2 episodes on a prime time show hosted by a current presidential candidate. We have brand mentions out the gazoo. We are going to be featured on a major network morning show in Times Square next week, and the station's call sign ends in 'C' and we are getting a link. I explained how important back links are to the owner, so he picked up the phone, called the network, asked for a link and got it. Sick, sick, sick. The owner guaranteed me a link going forward every time we do a TV show, and we average one every 2-3 weeks. I've found at least 7 instances where our site shows up at the top in Google's knowledge graph for commercial search terms with greater than 20,000 searches. The site is grossly underperforming because of major, but easily fixable internal issues. My target keyword list has over 200 keywords that get over 18,000 searches per month. Without any tricks, we should be able to get every one of our keywords into the top 3 and quadruple our organic traffic simply by executing the fundamentals. We only have one competitor with better link metrics. I got lucky. I stepped in shit. I got hired to do a tuneup on a Lamborghini. I digress.
I'm a technical SEO geek who gets his jollies reading Google patents and experimenting with expensive SEO toys, and I believe it's only cheating if you get caught. It's all about risk and reward. If I were to do anything underhanded at a major website it would never point directly at the money site. If we ever got penalized, my career is over.
In the current environment, black hat SEO is brutally hard. The days of blasting and ranking a site with GSA SER are over. PBNs are effective, but building a good one that's semantically themed is expensive and resource intensive. In my current corporate niche, a black hat affiliate site could never crack page one for a major head term. Google would never let it happen. Blackhatting is effective at informational terms, but brutally hard at transactional terms.
The black hat guys that are making money these days are awesome, and I would hire one in a minute. Google has made SEO really, really hard. The good black hats make the best white hats.
I've been lurking here for years, and this OP really got my interest because I am a huge proponent of Silo Architecture and this approach appears to be a highly refined evolution. The effects I've seen with silos are likely a subset of this technique, assuming the OP is telling the truth. Once I get the mess cleaned up, I am definitely going to do a little experimenting.
I've been working on a vanity SEO blog I've been keeping out of Google's index. When I get it where I want it, it's fodder for my resume. If you want the URL, PM me.