I must have misunderstood your "Stack growth is just something you don't have to worry about for almost all scenarios you're likely to encounter.".

It's fairly intuitive to walk a mesh recursively by following adjacent edges and you have to keep track of where you've been which means storing a lot of data somewhere. Maybe there are better algorithms but sometimes you just reach for what's most obvious. I suppose there are many analogous applications of traversing a graph structure.