By "classic functional patterns" you mean recursion. There are other ways to implement functions that are "classically functional" using techniques other than recursion, that do not blow the stack. I'll talk about each and their tradeoffs.

Right, but is this a concern for most JS?

I realize that JS is becoming more popular for various tasks -- not always relating to the web -- but still, I kind of doubt that 99% of the JS out there is going to run up against these types of problems. Perhaps something like Uglify.js or similar might, but then again, if you're implementing a parser (or any other static code analyzer/tool) then you're probably going to avoid most libs to start with.