Yes, a lot of people are doing this, and it's not a bad approach.

There's another approach you can take for continuous space pathfinding, however, which is to use visibility graphs.

See http://www.cs.kent.edu/~dragan/ST-Spring2016/visibility%20gr..., for example, for some explanation and diagrams.

This is the approach I used in PathEngine (www.pathengine.com).

A lot of people are put off by the possibility for graph explosion in situations where there are a lot of obstacles in an open environment, but PathEngine works around this quite effectively by detecting these kinds of obstacles and pulling them out of the visibility graph (and pathfinding search).