[barrkel]

Most recursive functions have a tree structure, either in the control flow or data flow. For loops don't really cut it; you minimally need auxiliary storage to track which branch you're currently on for every ancestor level, either explicitly by pushing indexes or structures onto a stack or queue, or implicitly with a work stack or queue. That's a bunch of accounting in an iterative solution you don't need with a recursive solution. The iterative solution will end up harder to read as a result. It'll also be a lot harder to reason about if the tree-like structure of the code is obscured.

If you need to return values for processing each child, and integrate them at the parent, then your solution gets tougher to reason about, as there's an ordering constraint and a dependency.

Recursion doesn't come up super often in most domains, but it's not rare. E.g. doing anything non-trivial with the DOM in a web front end, parsing an XML or JSON document, etc.