Comment by smabie

I mean, they might suck, but that's not really true that most languages don't use them. I can think of a lot that use them as their default data structure (OCaml, Haskell, Scala, Common Lisp, Racket, Clojure, etc). They're nice with recursion or if you don't know the size of your data ahead of time. But honestly, I've only used recursion a handful of times in my entire career, despite working almost exclusively with functional languages.