I think dask is in heavy usage in real production systems. Let me cite one such usage here, from Capital One (no affiliation, just referencing a big bank for 'production ready' purposes) https://www.capitalone.com/tech/machine-learning/dask-and-ra... (also not necessarily suggesting any rapids/GPU usage, you can decouple it from the article)
And note the article is from Nov 2019. Two years is a substantial amount of time for further improvements.
I don't see how you can argue both that and that dask distributed is production ready at the same time.
I've been in big data for 15 years and was probably one of the first few thousand production hadoop users. If you think "a big company used a big data tech so it's production ready" is an argument then I've got a few bridges to sell you. A lot of companies use a lot of technologies that they spend a lot of time beating into a shape where for their specific use cases they work just well enough to not get them all fired.
Dask has solved specific problems for us and we are grateful about it. I remain open minded about other choices and listed them with the understanding I have about them.
Switching to pandas when you can is going with the philosophy of keeping things simple. I like the flexibility of going back and forth between these as and when I choose.