I guess you could view it that way although I prefer to think of what Smalltalk developers do as living inside a REPL. And that is indeed something I can relate to. I program Julia and I basically stay in a REPL all day. But I don't regard that as the same as using a debugger. Like a Smalltalk developer, I evaluate specific functions/methods with particular values. I don't step through code. I am pretty sure Smalltalk developers don't step through code a lot.

Rather they do live changes of their code, and then evaluate various objects to verify that things work as expected. That how I seem to remember working in Smalltalk many years ago.

I am not a fan of debuggers, although I do use the REPL a lot. I suppose like Rob Pike, I used them only for very limited tasks, such as getting a stack trace or getting some sense of control flow. But as soon as I have that, I spend more time looking at code and reasoning about it, than stepping in a debugger. With a REPL I can try out assumptions I make about the code, rather than being forced to step through it.