Emacs lisp is a dialect of LISP and especially Scheme. Most of scheme interpreters do have a optimization of Tail Recursion, but emacs lisp doens't. I searched the reason in `info elisp' for a while, but I fail to find it.
P.S. Yes, there is other iteration syntax in elisp like `while', but I still cannot find a good reason why they didn't implement tail recursion like other scheme interpreters.
Emacs Lisp was created in the 1980's. The Lisp dialect that the Emacs author (Richard Stallman) was most familiar with at the time was MIT Maclisp, and Emacs Lisp is very similar to it. It used dynamic variable scoping and did not have lexical closures or tail recursion optimization, and Emacs Lisp is the same.
Emacs Lisp is very different from Scheme. The biggest difference is that Scheme is lexically scoped, but this was only recently added to Emacs Lisp, and it has to be enabled on a per-file basis (by putting ;;; -*- lexical-binding: t -*- on the first line) because doing it by default would cause many incompatibilities.
There has been some work to replace Emacs Lisp with Guile, a Scheme dialect. But it's not clear whether it will ever reach fruition.