I guess I can imagine workflows that are overly debugger dependent - the programmer has a “trust nothing” mentality and checks the behavior of the code against their mental model of the code “too much” thus slowing them down.

But I think theres reason to think the programmer can maintain a mental model of the program while using debugger queries to verify aspects of that model in a way that’s a lot more efficient than relying on mental model alone. Beyond that at some point observation of the behavior of the program will come into play — and I don’t see why utilizing the power of a debugger to generate a lot of precise observations quickly isn’t a pure win ...