Many Arduino compatible boards support hardware debugging. For example the Adafruit Feather series have connectors for a J-Link debugger. The Arduino Nano 33

Many Arduino compatible boards support hardware debugging. For example the Adafruit Feather series have connectors for a J-Link debugger. The Arduino Nano 33 BLE and Sense have pads on the botom to solder the leads of a J-Link cable. STM Nucleos even have the debug probe built in accessible over the same USB port. PlatformIO https://platformio.org/ https://platformio.org/ is the preferred Arduino IDE (a plugin for VS Code). It has support for hardware debugging, C++ code highlighting, code completion and Intellisense.