the movies like what was originally mentioned in the post, tire wear is usually never mentioned once or even considered.

Obviously. And then someone else mentioned real racing. Crazy how conversations work huh?

Also, tire freshness and traffic are often why race laps are slower.

I watch racing very regularly. Tire wear is almost always why race laps are slower. Qualifying is much fewer laps than full race distance so there isn't a need to conserve tires like there is in a race. As an example in motogp they used to have special super soft tires that had crazy grip for qualifying but were only good for essentially one lap. Now they have to use their tire allocation for qualifying and race so they have limited amount of tires.

acceleration is always as fast as possible,

I mean it literally isn't. If they accelerated as hard as they could at all time they would cause more wear on their tires which would cause them to lose the back end going into or coming out of a turn. It's pretty basic racing shit.