You can pass everything by value, write very child-friendly C++ code, using std::map like Python dict and std::vector like Python list, and still VASTLY beat the speed of an interpreted, weakly-typed language like Python.

But nobody does that. Chances are someone on the team takes a shit about unnecessary memory copies, the code will be littered with a smattering of pass-by-reference and pass-by-pointer, there will be std::shared_ptr, std::weak_ptr, std::unique ptr everywhere, and if you're lucky some intern will have committed some C-ish C++ code that will leave you gift of memory leaks, and now all of a sudden you need everyone to understand all the nuisances of the language and how memory works.