Md devices do "degraded" by default and it seems fine. Indeed, I believe this is the default operation of all other multi-device systems, but of course I cannot verify this claim. I dislike all features that by default prevent from booting my system up.

The annoying part of this is that if you do reboot the system, it will never end up responding to a ping, meaning you need to visit the host yourself. In practice it might even have other drives you could configure remotely to replace the broken device. I use md's hot spare support routinely: an extra drive is available, should any of the drives of the independent raids fail.

Granted, md also has decent good monitoring options with mdadm or just cat /proc/mdstat.