Implicit in that argument is that these kernel developers are writing low quality code / coding mindlessly. That’s a bold statement to make when you don’t know who I’m talking about.

At no point has anyone suggested using the debugger in lieu of understanding what the program does and that’s a pure strawman. Understanding is step 0. Once you’ve done that piece, a debugger levels up your game. Same with other tools like profilers, printf debugging, EBPF debugging, etc. Hell, even simple things like executing the code in the first place / running tests / gathering metrics is a debugging tool. It’s rare that someone stares at a difficult bug until they see the matrix. It usually involves iteration cycles of some kind to test out different hypothesis / collect data and a debugger is one tool to speed up those iteration cycles.

There was a story on HN a while back about how one of the inventors of Ethernet had to hook up oscilloscopes to figure out what the electrical signal was doing to figure out why CSMA wasn’t working properly. An oscilloscope is an analog debugger and you can’t tell me that the inventor of Ethernet didn’t understand Ethernet or that the oscilloscope hampered that in any way, especially since the bug turned out to be very nuanced with a chip generating a spike switching modes.