> Not the case in C++. Am I wrong here?

Probably. It seems you "have" to do these things because you want speed. But if you want speed, then you'll have to do them in C++ as well.

> I am not taking about researchers, I am talking more about businesses.

This applies to businesses more than anything. Your manager does not give a single fuck about the purity and the performance of your code before its deployed. Until then the only thing that matters is that the product is developed before your competitors get the contracts for as low of a cost as possible.

And when code is deployed, it will often not even be in C++. A lot of the time you have to port it to C because there are not C++ compilers for a platform, or you will keep it in ONNX format and then deploy on some runtime to keep maintenance easy.