Careful with CTEs in older postgres. Until the most recent versions they were an optimisation fence (predicate push-down would not pass through, meaning the CTE would often result in an index or table scan, potentially multiple times in the recursive case. This can be a huge problem over large data, though obviously in many circumstances with small enough data it is still efficient enough.

That concern doesn't really apply to recursive CTEs though.

Or rather, recursive CTEs inherently require that you select only what you need.

A little difference that the non-recursive case of "I'll just use a CTE for same functionality but better readability" which can deceptively bite you prior to PostgreSQL 12.