I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad way to begin thinking about multiplication. The thing is that multiplication has more natural visualizations and meanings in different contexts. Repeated addition makes sense when you’re working with positive, whole numbers. But we need to reach for other ways to think about it as we push into fractions, negative numbers, and so on. Not only that, but having other meanings handy will often allow you to be more flexible, and choose the way to think about a problem that makes it less cluttered and more tractable.

Still, I’d generally avoid saying “no – that’s a bad way to think about it” and instead say, “yes, you can think about it that way. AND… you can think about it this other way too, and that ends up helping us a lot!”