In my time on this earth, I’ve found most bookies to be rubes when it comes to sports betting but they can deal -110 so they thought they were a lot smarter than they were. Surprised you would give them that much credit.
Shading lines and moving on air or paying for software to do so is easy. Being willing to break the law/tolerate idiots telling you their mother has cancer so can’t pay this week is the hard part.
If the “teams bookies need the most” thing had any large scale evidence behind it, it would show up in data since so much bookmarking is run by large corporations nowadays. There would be threads on boards like this “Most likely rigged games this week” that people would be piling into.
Who cares if bettors think they got screwed? It’s bettors lol, people think slot machines and blackjack are rigged, as if you would ever need to do that.
You’re most basic point that not everything in life is on the up and up is obviously true but you just make such wild extrapolations nowadays it’s tough to even bother parsing through but I digress