Recursive CTE queries are powerful but confusing and limiting. This old-school procedural programming approach may be a much better fit for developers untrained with SQL, and that is, in my opinion, the majority. On the other hand, the procedural approach may be something most developers feel comfortable with.

No please. Recursive CTEs are really easy to understand, and they are tail-recursive loops, so they are just loops, and they are easy to understand as such if loops is what you understand. Writing a loop in procedural SQL is not better, just a) wordier, b) not easily amenable to relational algebra. (b) is a big deal.