Agreed, I spent a lot more time using debuggers when I was getting started

What do you mean “visual debugger?”

the intellij debugger, for example, as opposed to a command line debugger

In vscode when you step to the next statement it highlights in the left pane the variables that change. Something like that.

It's useful for a beginner e.g in a for loop to see how `i` changes at the end of the loop. And similarly with return values of functions and so on.

Presumably an IDE rather then dealing the gdb CLI.

I don't often need gdb, but I appreciate the emacs mode that wraps it every time.

I think it depends on the debugger and the language semantics as well. Debugging in Swift/Kotlin, so so. The Smalltalk debugger was one of the best learning tools I ever used. “Our killer app is our debugger” doesn’t win your language mad props though.

Might be something to this. I relied heavily on IDE debugger and was integral part of my workflow for a while as a yungin and but very rare that I bother these days (not counting quick breaks in random webapps).

Perhaps been underappreciating the gap in mental intuition of the runtime between then and now and how much the debugger helped to bridge.