No, that's not bad. Bad is when the fan dies
Quite often they do recover enough to flower though. That one doesn't look too bad. I'm not sure whether cutting the fan helps the plant or the gardener. It
may speed up new growth from the centre but the trade-off is that you lose photosynthesizing leaves. Perhaps that's something we should look into and experiment.
Could any of the granular fertilizer have accidentally got inside the middle of the fan?
You're joining the many of us that hate spring sickness! That's why we started the informal spring sickness task force many years ago, but it's such a difficult problem to study because it can be erratic and only happens once a year. For example one year I experimented with autumn fertilizer on half of one bed and not the other half. None of the plants got spring sickness the next spring, it was a low spring sickness year, so that experiment told us nothing. That's something that has caused many false hopes because most people treat all their plants at the same time, so there are no untreated ones to compare.
