I think that inference would still be the main use case, but sure, you could also use it for graph inspection, training, whatever, if you really wanted to.

Looks like tfcompile still exists, but I have never used it myself. Doesn't look to be much better documented than the C++ API itself. The full C++ API of course gives you way more flexibility and doesn't involve this special process of compiling a specific model. We have been pretty happy with our additional wrapper library tensorflow_cpp, allowing us to easily load arbitrary frozen graphs and saved models for inference.