You can do this in any language, functional or not. Every language has recursion, every language has a simple one liner way to do reduce.

They have generally had them for over a decade now.

I don't know if it's the case any more as I mainly work alone, but I often saw new programmers had been taught about recursion, but didn't actually understand it. So they never used the concept until you pointed it out, even if it could vastly simplify their code.