is aborting tasks a bad thing?

If you have another choice that works for your situation, it may be better than aborting.  Aborting costs the project some resources.

On the other hand, aborting is a better option than simply letting a task expire by deadline failure.  So it is common advice here to abort remaining tasks when someone is taking a host out of Einstein service.  Another case this may apply is when a combination of circumstances means one has a huge number of tasks which cannot possibly be completed in time for deadline.  After first suspending task fetch, or fixing something which will preclude future over-fetch, trimming down the pending queue by aborting sufficient tasks gives your forum partner a sooner start on getting a resend sent to someone else who is more likely to do a successful return soon.