From what I had seen, it is fairly common, but not universally accepted. OTOH, there is NO universally accepted definition of 'life"! I first saw this definition in a book published in 1980 (forgot the name, unfortunately), which was emphatically about "life as we don't know it". Each chapter covered a hypothetical planet (or star, or interstellar gas cloud) with life based on something other than carbon/water combination. Ammonia-based and hydrocarbon-based life each had a chapter, but as far as the author was concerned, those were mundane ones-- still chemistry-based. Really strange ones were life based on interacting magnetic fields, or on spin states of atoms in solid hydrogen.

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.