Pre-caffeine random early morning musing: there's almost a continuum from "normal" C style development (every change necessitates a complete rebuild and restart of the "program") to Smalltalk-y / lisp-y tinkering with the code of the running instance live. There's neat stuff you can do on the latter end of that scale but (as you mention) there's also caveats you've got to start thinking of and unless the language / compiler / runtime provides support you may be out on your own limb.

(As a specific (maybe) example, emacs has just now added support in 28.1 so that if you're interactively evaluating a defvar declaration it will now actually override an existing declaration (where previously it'd be ignored in subsequent evaluations same as if you'd re-eval'd the statement in the code (and any similarity of this paragraph and lisp is purely coincidental (probably)))

Anyhoo, agree you've got to be aware of the limitations (and capabilities) of where you're trying to work because if you're in a strange land things may trip you up.