When I have a bug, I find a lot of the time, my basic assumption of what the system is doing was wrong, largely because I had no visibility into what it was doing.

For something like status effects, I was thinking about using a datalog engine, like jasonwatkinspdx mentioned in a sibling comment. That way, you can query it for applications of status effects, instead of hunting it down in code.

That said, I never heard any game dev talking about Datalog, and was wondering if there was a reason for that--whether it's obscurity, or if it's impractical for some reason.