> Tail recursion IME is a bigger foot gun

This is true for some languages, but not all.

E.g. scala has @tailrec annotations, which make it a compile error for the annotated function to not be tail recursive. Clojure doesn't have tail call elimination, but has the `recur` special form for explicit recursion that is guaranteed to not consume any stack space.Rust has reserved the `become` keyword that will eventually guarantee tail call elimination (So pretty similar to Clojure's recur, but I think Rust's version will allow mutual recursion)

Zig goes the whole hog, and has `@call(modifier, fn, args)`, where `modifier` can be things like compile_time, always_tail, always_inline, never_tail, never_inline, and a bunch other desirable guarantees you might want.