I feel almost exactly the same way as you. I've flitted around the research/applied research boundary for ML for the last decade+, so I write plenty of Python. I enjoy the way Python gets out of my way so I can focus on interesting research problems. But the actual act of writing code in C++ is so much more fun, once you get good enough at it that the footguns don't trip you up.

The embedded AI space is a pretty good place to make money writing C++. I was in autonomous vehicles for a bit. It didn't really interrupt my post-Google compensation trajectory, and I got to write performance- and safety-critical C++