I'd say the opposite. Mutually recursive functions are notoriously hard to get right and debug, and many languages have stack limits. Often it's better to maintain the stack manually.
That has not been my experience, but I know many people who agree with you. IME, the difference has been that I came into CS with a more mathematical (formal) approach to programming, and they tended to come at it with a more mechanistic approach (especially when I hear it from non-CS developers, often EEs).