Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are these players interacting in any way? If they aren't then it could be more tolerable, but one player being more than several seconds behind others is going to lead to a rather undesirable experience, especially in the middle of a battle (and having most of their commands dropped due to being invalid equally so)
Giving the undesirable experience to one player is strictly superior to giving it to all of them. There just aren't many modern multiplayer games where slow players can negatively impact the experience of others, and that's because the industry has learned how terrible the experience is. And that's for players playing in good faith on bad connections - abuse by inducing latency was a big thing in the past. Think a pl…
Consider for instance the situation where-in one player's simulation enters the spiral-of-death, under the policy that you're proposing this player is effectively removed from the game; I would say this is a substantially worse trade-off -- I know that I would personally prefer some mild annoyance of brief pausing as opposed to a player leaving the game (and in session-based games, as RTS's generally are, a team-mate leaving often ruins the entire game)
Abuse is indeed a problem that most games I've seen of this nature don't address, and while there's no perfect solution, it can be quite effectively curtailed. In the systems I've designed, the basic principle is that each participating player has an allocated amount of wait time which serves as a quota that is charged while-ever the game can progress/run, but cannot, due to them being in a wait-state (connecting/loading/reconnecting/stalling/explicit pausing/whatever). There's some extra logic for handling the oscillation of wait-state.