Couldn't agree more, a proper debugger is not just a glorified printf.
Where I currently work there are two of us who actually leverage the debugger everyone else is using printf() style debugging.
I can find an issue faster in a codebase I've never seen than devs who've worked on it for years but in another part - the superpower? hit a breakpoint nearby and single step through it at high speed adding stuff to the watch list then repeating it and watching the watchlist mutate.
I really liked working with xdebug in my PHP days.
But in my experience JS debuggers (outside the browser and inside the IDE) were kinda brittle, probably because of all that bundling and compilation going on.
Where I currently work there are two of us who actually leverage the debugger everyone else is using printf() style debugging.
I can find an issue faster in a codebase I've never seen than devs who've worked on it for years but in another part - the superpower? hit a breakpoint nearby and single step through it at high speed adding stuff to the watch list then repeating it and watching the watchlist mutate.