I think, their point (and also my experience) is that you get taught about it in university a lot more than about simple loops, so it feels more important even though you rarely use it in reality.

Same thing goes for linked lists and inheritance...

Most devs I know like recursion. Trouble is that many popular languages don't support tail recursion, but throw a stackoverflow error after a few thousand levels. So you have to keep track of max recursion depth manually, and it starts to look like a complicated solution