> and I commonly see programmers saying thing like "you shouldn't use a debugger"

Sorry, but who TF says that? This is actually not something I hear commonly, and if it were, I would just discount this person's opinion outright unless there were some other special context here. I do a lot of web programming (Node, Java, Python primarily) and if someone told me "you shouldn't use a debugger" in those domains I would question their competence.

E.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39652860 (no specific comment, just the variety of opinions)

Here's a good specific example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26928696