A great dev “should” have more than one tool at their disposal.

I find that “exploratory debugging” (for lack of a better term) is an under appreciated skill — using the debugger to learn about the code by seeing it in action as part of the ramp up process.

I mostly skimmed the post but seems they’re using “debugging” as more the process than a specific debugging tool?

However, a contrary example to your point about being “able to understand code even without a debugger” is using a dev console in web browser to ‘debug’ html/css/js etc. Depending on the role that _could be_ considered an important skill (a specific case being examining http status codes).