In my younger years, I used to employ the Y combinator as a way to avoid naming recursive functions because I didn't want to necessarily dignify single-use code by abstracting it into a named function that I'd never call anywhere else. Instead of calling itself in the non-base case, the anonymous lambda simply calls a first-class function passed into it, with the necessary plumbing abstracted into the generic combinator.

Fixed-point combinators can be made to work with tail recursion, so I don't think tail recursion forces anyone to name anything. Certainly, how easy it is to go with this particular approach depends a lot on the semantics of your chosen (or imposed) programming language.