How does Hard Failover work? Our nodejs client kept trying to hit a node that was in Pend state

The node restarted because the VM ran out of memory and crashed. I then kept the node down and added more memory, but I thought couchbase would handle cases where a node dies in a cluster and becomes unresponsive. Is enabling auto-failover as simple as going to that Auto-Failover page in settings and clicking the enable checkbox? Are there any downsides to enabling it, or anything we need to do in preparation for it? Will the act of enabling it temporarily take down the cluster or impact the cluster in any way?