Not "doing" recursion as a principle is often a sign the person has not been exposed to functional languages or relational kind of programming like Prolog. It often points at a lack of experience with what perhaps is not so mainstream.
Or the person is sensibly trying to make the code easier for other people to understand.
I am tech lead and architect for large financial systems written in Java but have done a bunch of Common Lisp and Clojure projects in the past. I will still avoid any recursion and as people to remove recursion from their PRs unless it is absolutely best way to get readable and verifiable code.
As a developer your job is not to look for intellectual rewards when writing code and your job is not to find elegant solutions to problems (although frequently elegant solutions are the best ones). Your job is taking responsibility for the reliability, performance and future maintenance of whatever you create.
In my experience there is nothing worse than having bright engineers on a project who don't understand they are creating for other less bright engineers who will be working with it after the bright engineer gets bored with the project and moves on to another green field, rewarding task.
