That was pretty much my experience developing a PS2/Dreamcast game in the 2000-2001 timeframe when working on the PC build, the _REASON_ I did so was because the PC port ran on 3dfx and that crashed the OS every 2nd-4th start so restarting was painful, being able to edit-continue was a godsend.

That said, still using debugger driven development and edit-continue to this day and marvel at the lack of experience of people touting Lisp or Erlang or whatever as the only places in the world with some kind of hot-code replacement.