Interesting, in my head aptitude was an ubuntu thing so I never tried in debian. Thanks for the tip.
I don't have anything against apt, it's just specific edge cases when it really saved me massive headaches by being able to remove and add during same change without having to remove all apps depending on it.
My first question was "what's the replacement for aptitude", and people pointed me to "yum shell". It was not as good, but I got used to it, and went with it.
If you run "aptitude" on debian, without any argument, you end up in a TUI, you can use it to install or remove packages from your system, and then see the "preview" of the change, and apply/cancel the change. The same way people use "yum shell".
I'm used to new "dnf shell", so I don't miss aptitude anymore, but I think aptitude is what you're looking for.