Sorry, "temporal reasoning" is not on the table. And if someone is having problem dealing with loops then recursion must be completely beyond them and rocket science.
The examples you give are symptomatic of usage patterns, and the tools you name lend themselves to copy-paste constructs for beginners. That is all.
p.s.
> non-programmers will happily write extremely complex Excel spreadsheets, SQL queries and even Pandas/Jupyter notebook
but for the life of them would not be able to troubleshoot if the copy-paste operation had a hiccup.
Sorry, you just haven't dealt with any real-world scenarios and real-world people.
Yes, recursion is not acceptable.
No, this isn't about copy-paste. In the "real world" non-coders produce write-only code. (Nobody can read or reproduce somebody else's "formulas", but they will happily write their own, spanning multiple pages.)
Troubleshooting and writing complex code is acceptable for non-coders, as long as the programming language is not Turing complete. (The human brain seems to have real trouble processing Turing-complete constructs, it is somethig that needs explicit training. Recursion or loops doesn't matter.)
The examples you give are symptomatic of usage patterns, and the tools you name lend themselves to copy-paste constructs for beginners. That is all.
p.s.
> non-programmers will happily write extremely complex Excel spreadsheets, SQL queries and even Pandas/Jupyter notebook
but for the life of them would not be able to troubleshoot if the copy-paste operation had a hiccup.