I've been working with PHP for years, and to this day, I struggle to make xdebug work. I don't think it's a genuinely good debugger, which is something that PHP sorely lacks and is a negative aspect of the language.
At this point it makes the language/platform a complete non-starter for me. var_dump or echo or print is just not proper debugging. Especially once you level up your debugger skills and utilize more of the functionality rather than just setting basic breakpoints.