I don't know about "the" recommendation, but it's how NIST standardized it (FF1 and FF3, both Feistel networks) and in the NIST rubric these aren't "new ciphers"; they're "block cipher modes".

I'll say I'm more comfortable using a straightforward FPE block cipher mode with AES than I am repurposing a weaker lightweight cipher to take advantage of its 32-bit block size.