[ATsch]

I feel like debuggers usefulness is directly correlated to how specialized it is. A good debugger is all about giving you specific information on your problem. I find the classical step-by-step debuggers do an incredibly poor job at this. I never use them.

A tier up from that for me are higher-level debuggers, generally specific to some technology. For example, the browser dev tools, GTK Inspector, wireshark, RenderDoc etc. I'd also put tools like AddressSanitizer, Valgrind and Profilers into this category. Because they are more specialized, they can give you richer information and know what information actually matters to you. I usually find I use these regularly when developing.

The highest tier is tools specialized to your specific application. This could be a custom wireshark decoder, a mock server or client, DTrace/BPFTrace scripts and probes, metrics, or even an entirely custom toolbox. Interestingly, print statements end up in this same category for me, despite being the possibly simplest tool. Being specific to the problems you actually face allows you to focus on the very specific problems you have. This tier is interesting because these tend to become not just something you use when things go wrong, but become part of how you write or run your code.

Under this lens, I don't think it's that surprising people don't really use general step debuggers that much. They are a primitive tool that allows you to have many of the benefits of tier3 debuggers without any of the effort involved in making custom tools. They are the maximum reward/effort in terms of debugging.