Interesting, how do you define CI in that case? IIRC, CI was originally defined as integrating continuously (i.e. daily or more frequently) and CD is delivering said code continuously. How does CI hurt productivity and how do you do CD without CI?
I've done smaller projects before where "CI" only consists of merging to trunk/main/master, while testing, linting, etc. is covered by code review and the honor system. I wouldn't advocate this for something business critical that a lot of developers collaborate on, but you can do CD with only trivial CI.
I'm tempted to just downvote you and move on with my life but I'm genuinely curious.
Given that it's meaningless to Deploy something without Integrating the changes, what do you _actually_ mean by "You don’t need [CI]. Stick with CD only."
Are you just talking about testing the changes? Help us out here.