I don't understand the lesson to be about "high-level problems", but about not seeing the forest for all the trees. A debugger can give an invaluably direct vie

I don't understand the lesson to be about "high-level problems", but about not seeing the forest for all the trees. A debugger can give an invaluably direct view of what is happening, but it can allow be a very narrow view. But the debugger is not the problem - in fact, when you don't know the code perfectly, a debugger can be very useful in enabling you to form a sufficiently complete model of the code in the first place. It only becomes a problem if, at that point, you keep looking at details rather than stopping to think about what you've learned.