We absolutely do, but it’s significantly harder to debug. Functions are inlined, variables are eliminated, loops unrolled, etc.

But yeah, very often it’s basically the only option, running an optimized build with debug symbols. This is why it’s such a problem with C++: debug builds are frequently pointless because the performance is so bad, which makes debugging a lot harder.

Yeah that makes sense. There's no good alternative in C++, thanks to the mess created by all the zero-cost abstractions that are very much not zero-cost without a the optimizations of a release build.