I'm more interested in the long-term effectiveness of this strategy. Do teams turn out into powerhouses after giving up or do they just get some (in my opinion) unfair advantage for a season or two?
I think in the long run it is definitely a successful strategy and it certainly helps them in the long run with a big unfair advantage over other teams.
These teams are able to make so much money because they are receiving D1 income while running D2-D3 rosters for a tanking strategy. They have no intent on competing. However, the extra cash will boost them up heaps. We have had some teams doing this in Australia D1 in the past and I believe there is currently one team doing it right now.
In the short term they lose games but in the long term they accumulate the cash to invest in their arena and be able to buy their way back into ABBL after a season back in D2. Teams that get demoted back to D2 are able to buy their way back by simply having more funds to burn through and can afford to make losses every week. E.g The salary cap of a D2 league (my league) is about 450k. Any more and you start making losses every week. I've seen these ex-ABBL teams come into D2 and run payrolls of 600k a week. They can afford to make the loss and the D2 teams can't compete.
This creates a unfair advantage to the genuine D2 teams and creates an bottleneck on true D2 teams as no matter how good your team is, there is no way you can promote (unless wtih a lot of luck) competiting against teams that can have 100-200k more than you in salary.