I don't know why there are so many non-answers or flat out incorrect answers to your question. Yes, js devs use debuggers and have for years. Firebug was creat

I don't know why there are so many non-answers or flat out incorrect answers to your question. Yes, js devs use debuggers and have for years. Firebug was created and popularized for browser js 10 years ago[1]. Node.js was released 7 years ago, got a debug option one year later using node debugger. It was CLI based and a bit shit. Tools which leveraged Node's debug protocol and Chrome's developer tools (node-inspector) for example were started 5 years ago[2]. Most recently some group associated (maybe on?) the Chrome team started creating a cleaner debug protocol and integrating directly with the Chromium project[3]. That's become the gold standard and is the standard way of debugging for Node 7+[4]. VSCode uses that protocol to offer debugging directly from the editor. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebug_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebug_(software) 2. https://github.com/node-inspector/node-inspector https://github.com/node-inspector/node-inspector 3. https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/9028 https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/9028 4. https://nodejs.org/api/debugger.html https://nodejs.org/api/debugger.html