I don't think anyone is arguing that print debugging isn't useful or is somehow archaic. That's a straw man. What the author and I experienced is that the vast

I don't think anyone is arguing that print debugging isn't useful or is somehow archaic. That's a straw man. What the author and I experienced is that the vast majority of developers don't use an incredibly powerful tool when it's available, and relatively easy to set up. I personally saw developers go through compile time cycles of 30 minutes to add and remove print statements than to bother using a debugger. Most people don't understand what's a stack view, or memory dump or the fact that you can modify variables at runtime to skip conditional checks to avoid recompiling. On dynamic languages it's even better, you can easily evaluate code, replace functions, import modules and call other unrelated functions, etc. That saved my bacon noumerous times in production with nodejs and python. Just connect to the container, send sigusr1 to the process to open the debug port, forward that to my machine and then connect my debugger and run code/json dump large data/put a conditional breakpoint and wait for that hard to reproduce bug to come to me. This kind of silly stuff got me "wizard" status in orgs i've worked in over the years and substantial pay raises over devs that were more conscious/hard working than me.