I'm not going to say the Varland trade was a stroke of genius, but hindsight is 20/20. Varland's ERA with the Twins went from 3.81 in 2022, to 4.63 in 2023, to 7.61(!) in 2024. His 2025 was looking better, but with his career trajectory, it was easy to say "he's not good, but we've got him on a hot streak, let's sell him before he regresses to the mean and get some kind of value for him."
Again, still not an elite trade and I think everything looks worse through the lens of the bad feelings we all had at the time, but if I squint hard enough I see what they were going for.