I can't tell whether it would harm the hardware or not, but how does powering the miner off and pausing mining differ from one another? when you pause mining the control board will get the PSU to stop feeding power to the hash boards, so in other words, it's almost exactly similar to physical shutting the miner down as far as the hash boards are concerned.
I am unsure whether or not this would result in the same level of wearout. I could imagine it depends on the specific implementation of the mining software/firmware and how it handles stopping the mining process. One thing that's different for sure is that fans can keep running a bit longer for cool down and that the control board will not suddenly turn on and off all the time. Given that hash boars are obviously the most important part of the miner this question is something I would really like to get to the bottom of. I'd probably have to ask a hardware engineer or developers of the firmware.