It's simpler, and easier to understand, not to use interrupts. As long as you are not wanting to do something else at the same time, there's no actual reason to use interrupts. For a simple IR remote receiver, which is doing nothing else apart from waiting for a signal - it's easy to use a simple software loop waiting for the signal, an interrupt driven routine would do exactly the same - except it wouldn't check for a signal, just perform an endless loop while waiting for an interrupt to appear.