If recursion is difficult to grasp, I'm afraid it's not going to get any easier from there.
I strongly disagree. Many people have never had to reason about recursion so explicitly before going into CS. Just because it's difficult to understand explicitly at first doesn't mean they won't get better.
If they never understand recursion, then that's a problem, but I think that probably says more about the teacher than the student.
The reason why I wrote it is because of my own personal experience. In my programming class, my friends were having hard time understanding recursion so that was the primary motivation for writing this blog.