While an elegant solution Josephus Problem I feel this is extremly unintuitive. If someone is trying to learn recursion then I believe this can be a good example for that but for production code for most applications I would rather have a longer easier to read solution for other developers to quickly understand what is happening.

Could just be a lack of knowledge on my part but I feel like this is an interesting discussion of how far is to far in terms of elegance over readability.

I dont know if its just me but solutions like this seem clever at first but from a practical stand point it is so hard for someone to come in and immediately understand what the code is doing.