Of course you can. It does mean that you need cooperation between the child and parent thread (to set up the signal handler so that resources are cleaned up) though. That's easy in a framework, kind of a pain in the ass if you're just trying to get some opaque client you were passed to do something in <10 seconds.
And that's just for IO. I mentioned elsewhere that you may want to cancel pure compute work.
You can see my point, I assume, that when your userspace program can cancel tasks natively it's much easier to work with?
