To be sure: dietary control is the cornerstone of weight management. It ultimately comes down to CICO as the most impactful lever you can pull, and not putting stuff in your pie hole is the simplest way to pull it.
Your example of rewarding yourself with a pizza every time you go jogging though is contrived though. I felt that way when I started exercising, and I often did eat a lot after a workout, but eventually (6-12 months) exercising became a more comfortable and routine thing for me, and that bad habit disappeared.
Now I just get a nice 600 calorie deficit every time I go to the gym, and basically eat normally afterwards. The psychological need to reward myself is gone, it's just what I do, the endorphins and the physical improvements to my body are reward enough.
Trained athletes almost always have some sense of what both their CI and their CO is and they have developed the discipline to regulate both. If someone is 50 lbs overweight yeah 90% of the work for them in the beginning will probably be bringing CI down, they are going to be way above maintenance and way out of shape so incapable of maintaining a highly energetic exercise anyway.
But once you get over that initial hump you want to start incorporating light exercise as quickly as is comfortably possible, and dial up the intensity (as well as calorie burn) as your body adapts. Moving the needle on CO is slower and harder than moving it on CI but that doesn't mean you shouldn't bother at all.