Agreed, I rarely reach for recursion myself when developing. Most of my transformations are map, filter, and reduce. Although from time to time, I will combine them with recursion when necessary. I find recurring from a reducing function to be great for traversing or searching trees or other recursive data structures. Usually these are accompanied by a ton of comments for the next developer. :)

I don't think of map operations as loops. Instead as parallel operations on elements of a list works as a better mental model for me.

When learning them coming from an imperative background, it's inevitable to start with that idea, but somehow feels like a limiting model.