I'm not sure that's a very good argument. 50 years ago there were a ton of companies that were confidently using hex machine code for large systems in producti

I'm not sure that's a very good argument. 50 years ago there were a ton of companies that were confidently using hex machine code for large systems in production. That doesn't mean things wouldn't have been 100x easier for them with higher level languages and more modern tools. Of course I can get by without a debugger if I really need to, but that doesn't mean I won't be a lot more productive with one.