The thing about printf debugging is that it works universally. All languages, all platforms, all stacks. Even down to the lowest levels of most software, there will always be some sort of log available.

While some tools/frameworks might have more robust debugging tools, if you have a dynamic role within an organization, you may not find it worth the effort to set them up if your target platform is constantly changing.

One real world example of this from my own work in PHP - there is a tool/lang-extension called XDebug that is great and provides step through debugging, but historically, it has been a pain to configure. It's gotten better, but when I can just as easily add a few `dump()` statements that expose the same data, it's overkill. Very rarely do I need to actually pause the running request to debug something and 99% of the time, I just want to know the state of that object within an specific `if()` block and a debug log gets me that same information.