I wonder, do you use a separate debugger, or a debugger that's integrated into your IDE? "Reaching for a debugger" is just pressing F5 in an IDE.
E.g. I keep wondering whether the split between people who can't live without debuggers vs people who rarely use debuggers is actually people who use IDEs versus people who don't.
Data point: I develop in Java and I use IntelliJ. I run everything in debug mode. So it’s really easy for me to enter the debugger.
But I find that if I have to step around more than a handful of times to find the issue then I forget what happened five steps ago. So I teach for print debugging quite often.
E.g. I keep wondering whether the split between people who can't live without debuggers vs people who rarely use debuggers is actually people who use IDEs versus people who don't.