I remember from somewhere that putting a loop inside of a coroutine is a pretty bad idea but I cant remember why. Could someone please explain why?

In general, that’s not a bad idea. I’ve written and seen lots of coroutines with loops.

Maybe this: https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/coroutines/shared-mutable-state-and-concurrency.html

so in theory, if each coroutine launched inside of a loop that doesn't edit some global / shared state and are completely independent of each other then it shouldnt be a problem?

If you have an infinite loop in a coroutine, and this loop doesn't have suspend functions inside of it, it will block current thread (because it will not allow other code to run on this thread), but it's a programming error rather than some issue with loops in coroutines

ah I see

A bit late to the show, but there's an excellent thread about it here: https://kotlinlang.slack.com/archives/C1CFAFJSK/p1608417755332100