While I agree with your premise, the thing that is driving the parent comment is the fact that when debugging a language such as Elm, there is no tooling to mak

While I agree with your premise, the thing that is driving the parent comment is the fact that when debugging a language such as Elm, there is no tooling to make sense of the output code. This forces the user to use standard JS debugging tools on a pile of JS that was not written to be debugged. This is a contrast to Java or C, where debugging tools and hooks have been built to indicate where the low-level code is mapped to high-level code. At the end of the day this is more a call for language authors and the people around them to develop tools to debug the language.