It's not working like that. There are a lot of tricks on how to hide PBN/301 redirects, so the only thing you can see is a cool post from strong websites. SR and Ahrefs will give some tips on the strategies of small websites, but it will be much harder to predict what going on on Google's TOP 10.
I did both. Main market: US/AU, but I've added RU.* subdomain + registered ru*domain to test another SEO strategy. If your main domain is a strong one, I would go with the subdomain!