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My gut feeling is that this approach can be prone to silent misbehavior that they cannot detect.

There's no reason not to patch HA to reload it's config and reapply it.

We're using this for internal load balancing, so we control both ends of the connection. If this started misbehaving, we'd see timeouts, dropped connections, or errors, which would show up in logs.

I see. Any reason not to patch HA to reload config?

Not sure; I'm not the author of the post (a colleague), but I'd guess it's a fairly complicated patch. I know the author has made some changes to the HAProxy codebase[1], so I'm sure he considered it.

[1] http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.haproxy/21025

Patching HAProxy to reload config is really hard. There have been ideas, patches, and discussions on the HAProxy mailing list for a few years now trying to get zero downtime reloads natively supported in HAProxy, but the reality is that it just is not as easy as it might seem.

For more details check out the mailing list: http://marc.info/?l=haproxy

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