They absolutely do. An interest-free loan that you know you will pay off on time is only "debt" academically. It's just shuffling money between accounts, effectively. After each credit card purchase, in theory, you could log in to your online banking and pay off the balance immediately with cash you have on hand in another account. You could do that even before the purchase transitions from pending to posted to your account. Basically, you're not in debt.

You're "in debt" when your liabilities exceed your assets. You have negative equity, and so these debts are claims against your future income.

That's what "in debt" means, in a nutshell: your future income belongs to someone else.

If we are going to write a story about how some population segment is "in debt", but we label everyone as "in debt" if they have any credit card balance, that is blatantly dishonest.