Definitely don’t feel silly about this, it’s a subtle thing! - I only thought of this because I spent quite some time figuring out why this other example didn’t work.
Seems reasonable, I have done this before. You will loose the ability to diagnose a misbehaving model by its sensitivity to initial conditions, and the R-hat diagnostic doesn’t make as much sense. But sometimes it can be a way of getting sensible answers out. Good luck with it!