I tried all these techniques and had this reaction to each:
Layers - I use a combination of master pages and page-specific layers, so this breaks quickly. It also creates a situation where comparing two options for a page involves either duplicating the page and toggling the layers you want for each option, or toggling layers on and off. Both take a lot of extra clicks and prevent quick and easy comparisons (or exporting, if you actually do want each option for different outputs)
Sections - I ended up doing this, but it is a total PITA if you have a page in the middle of a section that you want to hide from export. I ended up making a section at the very end of the document and putting the page alts into it, but it was annoying
Work Boards - certainly offers the best view of the options, but I found this to be clunky to put the option that I wanted into the export. It was clunky
Page Layers (Groups) - same issue with the first option, this breaks immediately when using master pages if you make updates to the masters, which I do a lot of
Still nothing as simple as every other app's "hide this page" option...