If you want to shovel bytes around in memory (or more likely, the memory model provided by your OS) that's your perogative, but there's nothing necessarily clever or contorted about relegating the responsibility of memory-management to your dependencies (including the compiler). Avoiding for loops is mainstream today, with your stream APIs, map/reduce, LINQ and what have you.

Loops are (in the general case) hard to reason about and provide few run-time guarantees. Predicate transformers with recurrence-relations are mostly intractable and a giant PITA. Variable assignment (or register overwrites) are hard to reason about, and loops (well... single entry/exit in lieu of goto, but whatever) were introduced to make it easier on the minds eye to follow the evaluation of programs and still they fail regularily.

Looping is not a simple task, it has real externalities wrt. program correctness (however you define it) and programming languages are providing more and more tools to avoid them and provide more run-time guarantees.