I've worked on projects where incremental linking after touching the wrong .cpp file will take several minutes... and this is after I've optimized link times from e.g. switching from BFD to Gold, whereas before it might take 30 minutes.
A full build (from e.g. touching the wrong header) is measured in hours.
And that's for a single configuration x platform combination, and I'm often the sort to work on the multi-platform abstractions, meaning I have it even worse than that.
> If I wanna use a debugger though, now that means a full recompile to build the project without optimizations
You can use debuggers on optimized builds, and in fact I use debuggers on optimized builds more frequently than I do unoptimized builds. Granted, to make sense of some of the undefined behavior heisenbugs you'll have to understand disassembly, and dig into the lower level details when the high level ones are unavailable or confused by optimization, but those are learnable skills. It's also possible to turn off optimizations on a per-module basis with pragmas, although then you're back into incremental build territory.