This code terminates only if all child-problems eventually are found not to have subproblems. So either it has infinite subproblems or it returns true. So recursion is good for a use case unless the problem decomposes into infinite subproblems, but in that case this test function never returns false.

Makes more sense to do it as breadth-first with only one return value:

   from collections import deque
   def isRecursionOk(problem):
       q = deque(problem)
       while q:
           problem = q.popleft()
           q.append(list(breakDownIntoSubProblems(problem)))
       return true