Duplicate SKU issue

I have products on a catalog only site that uses the duplicate SKU snippet for multiple products with differing post_names. We do it this way because the product’s tabbed details would change depending on which version of the product we were using.

Up until recently this snippet allowed for us to be able to import products with duplicate SKUs, but now I get the “Product already exists” status message.

My research found a StackOverflow comment that using this snippet could interfere with a cart function, but we don’t actually use the cart as it is an online catalog only.

Can this be worked around or overriden?

— KS