As others indicated, tail recursion exists.

There are also languages where the standard guarantees code will use tail recursion in certain cases. An example is scheme (https://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/r5rs/Proper-tail-recursi...)

There also are languages where you can write recursive functions in a way that makes the compiler err out of it cannot make the calls in a tail-recursive way. An example is scala (https://www.scala-lang.org/api/2.12.1/scala/annotation/tailr...)

That removes the possibility that a programmer mistakenly believes the compiler will use tail recursion.