It's my understanding that you want to create as many relevant keywords for your niche as possible and to create a separate landing page for each keyword and optimize that page; both on page optimization (tags, content) and off page (backlinks). For example: Lets say I sell one type of product. There are no variations of the product (no different colors, sizes, etc). Just one product. For this product there are hundreds of keywords that could be used to identify this product both directly and semantically (synonyms). Do I utilize all these keywords and create a different webpage for each of them? This would be in an attempt to get as much traffic from search as possible. Please confirm this is the right thing to do. It makes sense to do this because you have more pages to capture traffic. On the other hand would the pages be too similar in content?
You kinda answered your self. too many pages on same product will lack unique content. It is hard to create 100 page on same item. You should do one page and optimise it to the extent. For example, one page optimise for "cat food" but with the keyword "red cat" somewhere in the text, could be pickup by the search engine for "red cat food". Proper optimisation will result and many keywords. If you check your analytics, you would be surprise what keywords have resulted in a visit on your page.