Yes, of course - but in general you want to avoid padding with nops because it makes the code larger (which, as well as costing more RAM, also uses more power and time to read the code from RAM, and fits less code into the instruction cache, which makes the power and time cost of reading code from RAM even bigger).

If you can make a compiler fill those NOP slots with useful instructions, then all the better.

It adds complexity for humans writing assembly code by hand, but that is a tiny minority of code now.