The aim of this paper is twofold. - In the setting of RCD(K,$\infty$) metric measure spaces, we derive uniform gradient and Laplacian contraction estimates along solutions of the viscous approximation of the Hamilton--Jacobi equation. We use these estimates to prove that, as the viscosity tends to zero, solutions of this equation converge to the evolution driven by the Hopf--Lax formula, in accordance with the smooth case. - We then use such convergence to study the small-time Large Deviation Principle for both the heat kernel and the Brownian motion: we obtain the expected behavior under the additional assumption that the space is proper. As an application of the latter point, we also discuss the $Γ$-convergence of the Schrödinger problem to the quadratic optimal transport problem in proper RCD(K,$\infty$) spaces.