I think we're mostly arguing about how useful the various approaches are. At least for me print debugging is a measure of last resort unless I want to extract some historical data out and I know it won't influence the timing of the issue I'm trying to chase down.

With print debugging your inserting the whole build + deploy + repro setup loop into your debugging, if that's a long time(say 20 minutes in one job I had with production hardware) you're in for a world of pain. I find that just about any other tool usually is an order of magnitude more efficient.

Also even the "step debugger" tools do the same thing you'd do with a print. LLVM for instance uses the IR JIT API to generate watch/eval values: https://releases.llvm.org/9.0.0/docs/ORCv2.html#use-cases

IMO you should relentlessly optimize your iteration times, that's the inner loop of development speed and print debugging fares pretty poorly in that area for all the reasons above.