> Now do breadth-first traversal. With the iterative approach, you just replace the stack with a queue. With the recursive approach, you have to make radical changes.

The reason is that no programming language that is in widespread use has first-class support for co-recursion. In a (fictional) programming language that has this support, this is just a change from a recursive call to a co-recursive call.

Haskell (I realize this may not pass your threshold for widespread use) has equal support for co-recursion as for structural recursion.