You don’t need breakpoints all the time though. If you’re familiar with the code (or just “talented”), you might have an intuition for what the problem is and it’s faster to just think through it (and maybe write a few quick prints) instead of interrupting your train of thought setting breakpoints, clicking continue, waiting for the IDE to freaking load the debugging session (cough Visual Studio), rerunning the test, etc.

Besides, every IDE has a different way to debug, so they might just not be familiar with the interface. I can’t tell you exactly how to debug in VSCode even though I’ve used it the most. I’ve had to run a debugger only a handful of times in the past couple of years and it’s always for codebases that are more tangled (e.g. .NET where there’s interfaces everywhere).