[cbolton]

Maybe I was a bit harsh too :)

I don't think the debugging experience is worse than in LaTeX (a low bar admittedly): you can print to the console in LaTeX but it's drowned in other messages. Instead of grepping the console in practice I use \show\thing, which is basically the same as doing panic(thing) in typst. What I do is put commented-out "panic(variable)" here and there, and use the comment/uncomment shortcut in the editor to see the value of the variable. With typst's incremental compilation I get immediate feedback, so a better experience than in LaTeX.