Maybe the act of compilation is an extra step, but I'd much rather have my development be in a high level language that is very suited to experimentation, probing, and testing, and then compile the final result down to something performant.
EDIT: I don't know much about the IOT world, and Tensorflow is likely a bad example as it's not designed to run on edge. So, I could understand that things like llama.cpp, GGML and GGUF are making strides towards easier runtimes. But I still think for dev-time, Python makes sense!