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I mostly agree, and proponents of FP shouldn't stress the recursion too much.

When I program in Haskell, I rarely use recursion myself. Most loops are just maps and folds. Need to build another structure from existing structure? Foldl'. Once I understood that the value being folded can be arbitrarily complex, FP became simpler (but terser) than iterative programming for me.

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I don't think of map operations as loops. Instead as parallel operations on elements of a list works as a better mental model for me.

When learning them coming from an imperative background, it's inevitable to start with that idea, but somehow feels like a limiting model.

Agreed, I rarely reach for recursion myself when developing. Most of my transformations are map, filter, and reduce. Although from time to time, I will combine them with recursion when necessary. I find recurring from a reducing function to be great for traversing or searching trees or other recursive data structures. Usually these are accompanied by a ton of comments for the next developer. :)

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