[mxz3000]

In production code, you'd generally avoid recursion to avoid stack overflows.

Given in most languages you can't enforce tail call optimisation, it's risky to use unbounded recursion.

[CoastalCoder]

I suspect this guideline varies a lot by industry or by target hardware.

The last time I worked on a project with that rule was about 23 years ago, and that was on a 32-bit system.