Julia should work fine in production (outside of having less mature tools to integrate with other services compared to popular languages that get direct support from the providers). That and like other said, it's not optimal for some domains (like really realtime stuff that can't have millisecond lags, though honestly latency can be kept low in general by having multiple replicas handling the requests), in embedded stuff (because of high memory profile for example) and it's sub-optimal in situations in which you can't keep the session alive (when the server will restart the application at every request, and the JIT will have a lot of effect in the response time).

The difference between an exploratory code in my opinion and production code is that production code must be correctly structured (comply to an architecture defined by the developers, properly separated in functions, readable), fully documented, unit tested, integration tested, properly tested in homolog/staging, logging, metrics, health checking and extensive error/exception handling.

So in general, during exploration phase you can use the already tested production code/libraries and extend them without much care on the above until you're satisfied with the approach/results (usually in a fast REPL/Jupyter/Revise.jl cycle). Then you start refactoring and implementing all the above to prepare for deployment (and probably during the testing you'll possibly find errors in your exploratory code, which may lead to another exploration phase). Eventually you'll end up with solid production level code.