And you actually can have xdebug installed without performance degradation if it is not automatically enabled on every request (think that was true for xdebug 2 as well). What you do is to send a special request payload to enable it when needed, can be done with a browser extension.
There is also phpdbg, shipped with php, it does not suffer from the same performance penalties that xdebug prior to version 3 had (not sure how it compares to xdebug 3). However it is a command line debugger only, it does not support remote debugging or IDE integration.
https://php.watch/articles/xdebug2-vs-3-benchmark
And you actually can have xdebug installed without performance degradation if it is not automatically enabled on every request (think that was true for xdebug 2 as well). What you do is to send a special request payload to enable it when needed, can be done with a browser extension.
There is also phpdbg, shipped with php, it does not suffer from the same performance penalties that xdebug prior to version 3 had (not sure how it compares to xdebug 3). However it is a command line debugger only, it does not support remote debugging or IDE integration.
https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WI-21414