Interestingly, I almost prefer Clojure's `recur` semantically. Means you don't have to change the function name twice if you rename it, and it's hard to miss that you're recursing.
One thing I don't think you can do with loop/recur, though, is optimize more complicated bits of recursion than a single function that calls itself. I.e. imagine a recursive call pattern that goes like f -> g -> f -> g -> ...
(edit: I'm pretty sure this is why trampoline exists, though I've never really played with it... https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.core/trampoline)
However it allows making anonymous functions recurse as well.