Just grabbed the source, and it's a pretty bog standard ./configure ; make. Simple build instructions in the readme. Not sure this is a daunting challenge for any even moderately skilled developer.
As long as the number of programmers is growing rapidly, it’s likely that most people who use any language are probably students. The distribution automatically skews toward beginner.
That has no bearing on whether we should have good tools for skilled developers, including debuggers & makefiles & source distributions. Eventually, students become moderately skilled. And we used gdb in class when I was a student.
> That has no bearing on whether we should have good tools for skilled developers, including debuggers & makefiles & source distributions.
Unfortunately, it's also the best explanation as for why we don't have them in practice, and why all software seems perpetually developed by fresh juniors (because it is).
Last time I tried to build GDB from source, which was some two months ago, it wasn't in any way simple. GDB comes embedded in some GNU binutils repo, instructions to build it in isolation weren't obvious.
I ended up creating a new VM with a more recent Linux distro, that came with newer GDB, and migrating everything I'm working on to it, because that was much easier than building GDB from source.
I'm not sure where you've been looking, but source tarballs have been available from both gnu.org and the GDB website for over 20 years, with every major release going back 30 years available for download.
This has definitely been an issue for me before, I think at least for a while Ubuntu/Debian didn't ship gdb with tui enabled, you had to build it yourself.