Once again, I end up answering my own questions here (after hours of frustration). Long story short: Increasing the recursion limit IS possible (in an extremely annoying way, you have to compile the engine from source (you can fork it on Github if you link your Epic and Github accounts) and manually adjust a “define” in ScriptCore.cpp) but sucky.
It’s better to refactor the code - better in terms of “what works with the engine right now” - to use loop control, as the maximum loop count can be easily set in project settings.