He did basic troubleshooting with task manager, on an obfuscated executable, with a disassembler and a memory dump, without knowing anything about the code base

He did basic troubleshooting with task manager, on an obfuscated executable, with a disassembler and a memory dump, without knowing anything about the code base, and fixed it with in-memory patching. So while I agree introspection can be a godsend, this specific case is not a tooling problem. Something this blatant is what happens if nobody takes a look. I can imagine they got tons of complaints, but 'it is slow' is nebulous enough to consider it basically unsolvable/normal. Maybe it never got a real bug report, maybe the report never made it past the service desk, maybe management thought it would cause a wild goose chase without resolving anything. But no developer looked into this, as just hitting a breakpoint in the 4 minute pause would insta-fix this.