Technically, you're supposed to do a 410 or a 404, but when some pages being deleted have those extremely valuable old high-reputation backlinks, it's just wasteful, so i'd say it's better to redirect, to the "next best page" like maybe a category or something, or the homepage, as the last resort. Why would it be problematic? Especially if you do a sweep and only redirect pages that have valuable backlinks.

I was only talking about mass redirecting 404s to the homepage, which I've heard is not great, I think what you're saying is fine -- but that sounds like more of a well thought out strategy.