The Chrome based dev tools have been an option for years using node-inspector. Had all of the basics that you would expect from a debugging. Breakpoints, step into/out/over, variables available at that location in the stack, REPL console etc.

It was kind of a pain in my experience to use the Chrome debugger to be your main editor. I've not used VSC for this, but I imagine it's nice to not have to flip back and forth between tools.

I was responding to the claim that it console.log was the only way.

You can't be serious.

printf-debugging is a fine way to debug a ton of cases, especially programs with concurrent components. The process of debugging step by step isn't necessarily superior or faster.

I'm not sure why not. AFAIK that's still your only option if you want to debug NodeJS code headlessly.

What about conditional break points, call stack, time travel, watch list, live editing, etc?

Wow, there are actually people using any of these?

More like all of these every day?

Running 'node debug script.js' will drop you into the command line debugger. It's a little painful though as the command line debugger does not have support for moving up/down stack frames.