Coming from a different domain (game development) I suspect there will always be a place for both approaches. Games can be quite complex to debug and profile an

Coming from a different domain (game development) I suspect there will always be a place for both approaches. Games can be quite complex to debug and profile and the complexity increases for networked multiplayer games. Typically many different tools are used each of which has strengths and weaknesses. It's pretty standard for non final builds of games to have a number of custom debugging and performance tools built in. These may display information in game or capture to a local log but commonly (especially for console games) they connect to an external tool running on another machine over a socket or custom debugging interface. This is both because it can be easier to build UIs on a PC and because, particularly for performance profiling, displaying the information locally can impact what you're trying to measure significantly. Consoles are normally debugged using a remote debugger running on a PC but that's often useful even for debugging PC games. Often console devkits had special hardware to support this which wouldn't be present in retail hardware which made debugging issues that only showed up on retail hardware challenging. While engines typically have some graphics debugging and profiling tools built in, it is also common to use external tools, often connecting from another machine. There are many of these: PIX, Visual Studio Graphics Debugger, NVIDIA Nsight, Intel Graphics Performance Analyzer, GPUView, Windows Performance Analyzer... They all have strengths and weaknesses so it's common to use more than one of them. Prior generation consoles were often unikernel-like as all OS type functionality was statically linked into your executable and you'd boot right into your game. Current generation consoles have something more like a full OS but you still get much more clearly defined guaranteed minimum resources and deal with hardware at a lower level than on a PC. Overall there's a wide range of both custom and generic but specialized tooling used for debugging and performance analysis and that's been a fairly stable reality for many years. I don't think this is a situation where one particular paradigm has to win out in the long run, more a case of using the right tool for the job.