listening to Scala courses and explanations I often hear: "but in real code we are not using recursion, but tail recursion".

Does it mean that in my Real code I should NOT use recursion, but tail recursion that is very much like looping and does not require that epic phrase "in order to understand recursion you first need understand recursion" .

In reality, taking into account your stack.. you more likely would use loop-like tail recursion.

Am I wrong? Is that 'classic' recursion is good only for education purposes to make your brain travel back to the university-past?

Or, for all that, there is place where we can use it.. where the depth of recursion calls is less than X (where X your stack-overflow limit). Or we can start coding from classic-recursion and then, being afraid of your stack blowing one day, apply couple of refactorings to make it tail-like to make use even stronger on refactoring field?

Question: Some real samples that you would use / have used 'classic head' recursion in your real code, which is not refactored yet into tail one, maybe?