Brutally killing request process prevents actions like read repair taking place for any partial results and reporting any stats on timeouts (not that it does a great job right now, but it should).

If there were mass timeouts around anything that uses a non-sidejob supervisor (for example deletion) could enough kills cause that supervisor to die and cause the application supervisor above to be unhappy enough to exit the app and take the node down?

Sending a message would be nicer (a Phil Collins "I don't care any more"), but that only works for requests on the local node, anything overdisterl would have issues.