i have never seen anyone respawn to avoid a chomper but i use respawn quite often. it is a valid and necessary tactic and whilst you can use it to get your cactus drone back you have to take a hit of at least 10 seconds everytime you respawn and that's 10 seconds you are doing NOTHING for your team. There are far better ways to use that 10 seconds!
I find it useful when you can see your team is top heavy in one character and you switch to one of the characters that isn't represented. Normally swapping to a sunflower or an engineer, those two characters seem to be underrepresented in most games.
