It is tricky. If the metaphor is addiction, then this becomes an especially polarizing issue. This is where JMo’s commentary is interesting — if that person isn’t simply going to go away, how do you deal with them? Can you help them? Can you live with them AS addicts? What if you cant just sever ties?
Rumple is divisive and there will always be that section of fans that are like “I am so done with Rumple, they just need to kill him already”. But with all my criticisms of the show, I actually don’t think A&E would go there, at least not straightforwardly so. Ultimately even they must realize that the impulse to wave Rumple (or really, what he stands for) away — which is to say, a character who tends to systematically struggle with and yet more often than not lose the battle against his own dark side — is at best naive, and at worst juvenile. Again for all the flaws of the writing, I don’t think turning Rumple into a Hans Gruber-esque villain would be narratively convincing either.
But yeah, I might be giving them too much credit here. If the shiny shiny plot demands it… sigh.