Losing approval is perhaps one of the worst ways to do this.
Why should players be penalized for playing the way they like?
It's not that frequent rest affects anyone other than the player himself.
I would say that strong restrictions have a greater negative impact on the game than if the game did not have them at all.
I am not buying the argument that it breaks the balance. No DnD game had practically any rest limits and it was never an important part of the games.
Because it's an rpg and rpgs are defined by choices. In the same way that killing random NPCs will make all other nearby NPCs hostile, it's reasonable that frequent long-resting (when companions explicitly tell you to rush to Point A) will result in disapproval of said companions. You
don't get to just do anything you want to in a game, because the developers have to code for all possibilities and it's good for games to be relatively immersive and responsive to character decisions.
How is companion disapproval a strong restriction on resting? It's a fairly minor penalty, as approval is relatively easy to get. A more extreme consqeuence would be Lae'zel just leaving your party entirely (possibly for re-recruitment later).
The only character whose approval grows that high is Gale. The second character is Shadowheart, but it's not even 50% as easy as in the case of Gale. A large loss of approval causes the player to be locked into the companion story that is a large part of the game.
Besides, I don't like to be rushed, especially in a situation where rushing will end up dying quickly.
Let's say the Lae'zel quest. There is no chance that a character below level 4 has any chance to patrol without cheese, and this is just the normal difficulty level. In the full game, playing very hard (or whatever it will be called), there is no option that you will be able to beat this fight without level 5. Most likely, in the full game, you won't be able to reach level 5 before clearing most of the map on the surface.
I don't like situations when the game is punishing me because the fight went wrong because this group of half-dead goblins massacred my character in one turn and I was forced to rest once too much.
