No, it is not common at all. You simply jump to the watchdog interrupt handler, or execute the "reset the CPU" instruction. No need for such convoluted fooler

No, it is not common at all. You simply jump to the watchdog interrupt handler, or execute the "reset the CPU" instruction. No need for such convoluted foolery with loops and timeouts to achieve exactly the same effect. Remember, embedded processors have no MMU -- there's no context switch when entering an interrupt handler.