If you get rid of the part where you have to repay your debts, it's just theft.
There are plenty of aspects of nuance with it of course including 'stealing to save yourself from starvation and causing someone else to starve' isn't morally right along with 'stealing when there were other viable alternatives without harm' is wrong.
And of course messy matters of scale when things get really messed up like the Great Depression where farmers may have had plenty of food but were fiscally precarious - and many of the hungry couldn't afford it - one person shoplifting bread may be a lesser harm but if farms were robbed enmasse could cause them to go under.
TL;DR - It is complicated and circumstantial.
I think you are on a interesting topic, but seems like you are comparing some quite different things.
In your example cutting open a drain cover is not directly away from anyone, where as stealing food is.
The thing you seem to be missing in your case, is that you are not taking into account the time factor and only looking at a single action.
I agree that cutting open a drain cover (vandalism) is less bad when saving a trapped child. However, I do not agree that there should be nothing bad happening to the cutter. Imagine if instead of a drain cover it was someone's house.
Would breaking a window and then being absolved of all responsibility be okay? Should there not be a middle ground where nobody is solely at a loss.
Perhaps the breaker could pay for part of the new window? Perhaps the city could pay for the window as appreciation for the effort of saving one of their citizens?
Perhaps here instead of stealing, the bread could be loaned, or sold at a cheaper price to those in need.
Do you see what I am saying here?
Investors and lenders play an important role in the economy. If theft makes what they do impossible it will cause a drop in the total productivity of the country as a whole. Which is to say stealing from them, especially at scale, is likely to cause far more starvation than it will solve.
Your idea has been tried: the peasants were hungry, it was the Kulaks with the excess food and money and the process of taking it from them was called dekulakization. Between 500,000 and 5,000,000 people died. This also led to the Holodomor with its estimated 7.5 million dead.
This all started with the observation that there were rich people and poor people right next to each other, and that taking from the rich to give to the poor must be a good thing. But it turned out to be one of the worst events in human history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor