Fabiano Caruana (previous World Championship challenger) has said that he’s happy to find lines where the machines have you slightly behind, purely because they’re less like to have been studied in detail by your opponent. Even with perfect recall of the first 20/30 moves in various lines, players are still going to steer away from some lines based on their and their opponent’s strengths (tough against super GMs with few weaknesses though). So you’re definitely right, I think there’s a lot of game theory here, albeit much of it settled by your team ahead of the actual match.