First part of your message seem to be in contradiction with the second one, but anyways -- keeping asserts in the release image and incurring the penalty of add

First part of your message seem to be in contradiction with the second one, but anyways -- keeping asserts in the release image and incurring the penalty of added checks (execution speed + all these text strings stored in the read-only segment) does not make sense without the release-approving validation providing the exact coverage of all tested code. That can be tough to obtain.