Do you consider this technique “BAD”?

Question

Sometimes you need to skip execution of part of a method under certain non-critical error conditions. You can use exceptions for that, but exceptions generally are not

Answer 1

Refactor. The clean solution will in most cases be to split this code out into a smaller helper function, from which you can return, rather than breaking out of your not-actually-a-loop.

Then you can substitute your break's for return's, and now people can immediately make sense of your code when reading it, instead of having to stop and wonder why you made this loop which doesn't actually loop.

Yes, I'd say that simply because it doesn't behave as the reader would expect, it's a bad practice. The principle of least surprise, and so on. When I see a loop, I expect it to loop, and if it doesn't, I have to stop and wonder why.