[devnill]

While VS Code is a great IDE, a lot of this article is simply untrue. Node has had an interactive debugger (and corresponding API) for years.

Prior to --inspect, --debugger gave developers the abilities to step through code and to jump into a REPL to examine and manipulate the application state. Beyond this, there were tools like node inspector(https://github.com/node-inspector/node-inspector) which provided a chrome inspector-like tool.

On top of that, these tools adhere to the chrome debugger API (https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/) which provides the ability to dump comprehensive data like the memory graph for those wishing to make profiling tools.