I said "Occasionally". If things aren't overly complicated, so you understand a lot about how things are working, you usually have a good idea when the debuggi

I said "Occasionally". If things aren't overly complicated, so you understand a lot about how things are working, you usually have a good idea when the debugging you need to do can be isolated from a huge mega-enterprise CI/deployment infrastructure, so you can do it much more rapidly and with low-level tools when that's helpful. The "works the same on your laptop" argument is important for some purposes (and that's one of the reasons I run Debian Stable on everything normally), but I think it gets misunderstood by many people who would have no idea how to run even a simple one-off application without big infrastructure. I don't recall CGI being sensitive to web server, version, or configuration, in practice. CGI should interface the same today as 30 years ago.