[thomastjeffery]

I expect that has everything to do with what language your are using.

If it has tail call optimization and clean pattern matching syntax, then recursion tends to be the more readable (and equally performant) way to traverse data structures, especially anything more complicated than a 1-dimensional list.

These two features (tail call optimization and pattern matching) have seen a surge in popularity over the last decade, notably in Rust.

[steveklabnik]

Rust does not guarantee TCO, just to be clear.