Hell yeah I'm claiming APIs I have trouble understanding with intuition are not well designed. You might even call them... unintuitive. The entire point of an API is for it to be consumed; A nice uniform API like Stripe or Qt is easy even with minimal docs. If a user has trouble with your application, you don’t immediately blame them, you have a UX problem. If your API is hard to use? That’s a problem. This only becomes more true as the stakes get higher. How do you feel about unintuitive cryptography APIs?

Have I ever used an API that is hard to use and confusing? Yes. JIRA, Workfusion come to mind. The latter was a SOAP API. Thankfully, I don’t really need to deal with SOAP anymore, and good riddance. In case of bad APIs, my approach has always been to strongly isolate them from my code with an abstraction; most dramatically by actually putting a service up that just interfaces with the API I don’t like and provides a minimal interface to the functionality I need. At work, I usually have to do that, for security reasons, even if the API is good.

Anyways, I really, genuinely don’t have any clue what you’re trying to prove here. You’ve gone on and on about how bad APIs exist and imply this means I must be lying. So what do I have to do, link to some docs and say “Hey, check out how usable this API is”? I won't bother but the two aforementioned (Qt, Stripe) are great examples in two completely different categories.

And I have literally not even the smallest clue how this ties back to debuggers. I can’t recall a single time my reaction to a confusing API was pulling out a debugging tool other than printf; more likely I’d play around in a sandbox or REPL instead.