There also used to be a special debug build of windows (and other MS software), which included debug symbols directly but also had various asserts etc. left in,

There also used to be a special debug build of windows (and other MS software), which included debug symbols directly but also had various asserts etc. left in, specifically to enable debugging of issues that reached into OS components (for example when developing anything that integrated deeply into OS, whether in kernel or userspace). Not sure if it's still provided but it was part of MSDN offering.