I believe Pitman and others believes a tuff no-conference strengthens a team for the tuff opponents you'll see in the playoffs while I guess it might increase chance of getting a starter hurt but then again I've seen starters get hurt in easy games as well there's just no guarantee of a players not getting hurt in any game.
Thing is especially for mountain team sometimes it's hard to get non-conference games because of travel distance and some small schools who have had success in 1A some bigger schools refuse to play them but for whatever the reason sometimes you have to take what you can get and you just play the team you've got.
Mitchell was harped on quite a bit in 2017-19 for having what was considered an easy non-conference schedule especially an academy school but ether other schools schedule was full or just wouldn't play them. Is that why they didn't make it to the championship? I doubt it.
So yes Andrews may have had an easier schedule but I really don't think that's what's going to decide the outcome of this game the only thing to me it says is it makes it harder to know how good they really are. Is North Buncombe that bad or Andrews that good? One thing about they beat them a lot worse than Swain did.