You're contradicting yourself. Raw, fully optimized executables for production would mean machine code for the target platform, not an intermediate bytecode that still requires a VM.
Not really, it would be one of the steps in the chain between design and implementation for a specific hardware platform. That is, unless that code is only ever to run on a single hardware platform, a rare occurrence outside of embedded applications.
The same reason an actual AI wouldn't play chess by brute forcing every possible position. Intelligent systems are about reasoning, not simply computing, and that requires operating at the level of abstraction where your intelligence is most effective.