Seems like it would be so out of place in a real industry code base, like a infinite loop waiting to happen. There are always better more readable and maintainable ways to accomplish the same thing.
Rather than `state := null; while condition do: mutate-state-and-recompute-condition`, you can do `let loop(state) = if shouldContinue(condition) then loop(newState) else resultOfTheLoop`. Rely on the tail-call optimiser to compile this to a genuine imperative loop.
This looks very odd the first few times you see it, but it's much harder to get wrong.
In situations where you think auto-vectorisation might help, you definitely want to do it as iteration.
This is partly why I like the system of transformers that LINQ is built out of; you can specify your query in a natural nice functional manner, and then let the optimizer convert it into a fast query.
The reason one might want to use recursion is when you're working on a data structure that is recursive in shape, like trees. And trees are very common, the Hacker News comments are one such example.