Do video games hide the player model underneath the clothing?

I appreciate everyone’s help for sure and I don’t want to sound stubborn, but no one has shown me what’s wrong, or rather, the disadvantage to the method I mentioned.

I had this idea to set the material for a certain body part to invisible if clothing was over it. I hesitated to use this idea because I’d never heard if it being done before and wondered if there was some major disadvantage to it that I wasn’t seeing.

I could defineately use the modular meshes, but the material method seems simpler. Again, is their a disadvantage to the material method vs the modular method?

I can see the modular method might be slightly better performance-wise because it doesn’t have to deal with a mesh underneath, but since a lot of video games do have a mesh underneath that isn’t invisible either, I wouldn’t think this would be a big problem.

TL;DR
One more question before I switch over to one of your suggestions:
What’s the disadvantage to my method?