Yeah, you can usually write a TCO based algorithm differently without recursion though it's often more messy of an implementation... In practice, with JS, I find that if I know I'm going to wind up more/less than 3-4 calls deep I'll optimize or not to avoid the stack overflow.

Also worth noting that some features in JS may rely on application/environment support and may raise errors that you cannot catch in JS code. This is often fun to discover and painful to try to work around.