Release builds have reached the point where the trade-off between performance and debugging is unacceptable. I'm using VS2017 and face the same problems.
Here[
^] are the compiler settings I use. They help, but it's still not as easy as a debug build.
You might also get some ideas from my article on
debugging live systems[
^], though most of what it discusses requires some infrastructure that you may not have the time to build or import.