You get messy code at least as quickly without a debugger, possibly even faster since bug fixes in my experience tend to be even more shallow, in many teams.

The values of the management, the values of the team, and resource availability is what matters in regard to writing, and keeping code maintainable.

I've worked with people who have had a similar idea, that using debuggers are somehow "bad", I have also had to rescue them by using a debugger to understand issues with code they had struggled to figure out for days, or even weeks, meanwhile causing severe issues for clients.

When you claim tools as the cause for your mistakes, then it could certainly be the case that the tool is of bad quality, which clearly is not the claimed issue with debuggers in the article. More likely though is that you haven't really learned when, and how, and why to use the tool.

Debuggers are brilliant for validating if you mental model of the code is correct, or more commonly, to understand how it's wrong. This can have a side effect of solving bugs, especially bugs in your own thinking