> The rare ones show up maybe 1% of the time

Lucky you lol

What I've found is that as you chew through surface level issues, at one point all that's left is messy and tricky bugs.

Still have a vivid memory of moving a JS frontend to TS and just overnight losing all the "oh shucks" frontend bugs, being left with race conditions and friends.

Not to say you can't do print debugging with that (tracing is fancy print debugging!), but I've found that a project that has a lot of easy-to-debug issues tends to be at a certain level of maturity and as times goes on you start ripping your hair out way more

Absolutely. My current role involves literally chasing down all these integration point issues - and they keep changing! Not everything has the luxury of being built on a stable, well tested base.

I'm having the most fun I've had in ages. It's like being Sherlock Holmes, and construction worker all at once.

Print statements, debuggers, memory analyzers, power meters, tracers, tcpump - everything has a place, and the problem space helps dictate what and when.

The easy-to-debug issues are there because I just wrote some new code, didn't even commit the code, and is right now writing some unit tests for the new code. That's extremely common and print debugging is alright here.