In an ideal world, we wouldn't use logging to debug things after-the-fact. We would use traces, monitoring, and yes, events. But we don't always live in an idea

In an ideal world, we wouldn't use logging to debug things after-the-fact. We would use traces, monitoring, and yes, events. But we don't always live in an ideal world, and logs are a simple and easy way to determine the sequence of events that happened after-the-fact, especially if there's something going on in a single application (which... happens to be a pretty big chunk of cases). And at the end of the day, few things are more versatile than a big wall of text with timestamps and request ids attached. Saying that logging is a code smell is a little like saying all tech debt is bad.