In my experience, modern optimising compilers can turn many naive loops into tail recursive loops.

Actually learning tail recursion and writing loops for it is a lot less necessary today than it was in the 1980s. It isn't necessary to teach it to beginners anymore because the compiler largely does the heavy lifting for us.

These days, tail recursion is a very advanced performance tuning trick, only used when you've positively identified your compiler version's implementation of your loop as the cause of slowness and you're willing to incur the increased code complexity for the increased performance.