The article gestures at (and the author has made a comment in this thread about) how this is the case for Zig. You are right that there is tension here, and so that's exactly what you do: accept less performance for the gains in incremental, and then don't do incremental for final builds. It's a fine way to go about it, assuming that the lack of performance doesn't make the program unusuable. (Some people add some basic optimizations to their Rust debug builds, for example, because no optimizations is too painful to actually use.)

Of course we can, C++ even REPL and hot reloading tools.

The main issue is that so far such tools haven't been a priority for Rust.