I spent the first year or two of my career thinking I needed to Do Recursion because thats what the textbooks said and hey, the language supports tail calls!

I learned, in the sense you learn by touching a hot stove, that:

A) you can't guarantee the compiler sees it as a tail call and optimizes it.

B) you are now open to a stack overflow appearing in your software at any given point due to compiler changes / your own changes that confuse the compiler, etc.

C) qed, don't do tail calls.