Does blindfold chess help you improve?

I tried blind chess a couple times and of course I'm significantly worse (I was playing against an 1800 LC friend irl who could see, lost 3 and won 1 all untimed).

I think the most defective thing trying to play blindfold is confusing positions, by that I mean calculating something by moving pieces around in your head but losing track of what the original position was. After that I hopped on chess.com and played probably the most amount of rapid chess in a while, it was an okay session as I did end up with a little less points than I started with but I got great games. Now that I was able to see, I actually felt kinda worse, opposite of what I expected and it was harder to visualize (this could have been because I didn't sleep much tho).

I was wondering if anyone had this happen to them switching from blindfold to regular or felt sharper 

I did play blindfold a few times and I did feel worse returning back to normal chess, but that was more because when I play blindfolded, my thought process simplifies and regresses greatly, not because my visualization was hampered.

The more tactical puzzles you solve and OTB slow games you play, you will start to slowly memorize the board and remember which square complexes are dark and light.

Eventually you will start to be able to solve tactics without a board if you try to memorize the squares and diagonals, bishop moves, knight moves, etc...

So yes, I do think it helps to slowly try and add that skill of visualization without a board.

In regards to blindfold chess, I would say it helps improvement, but very inefficiently. it would be much more effective for your chess growth to get better at blindfold chess through playing chess than just training blindfold.