But honestly, in all my years, Visual Studio has been (by far) the best non-commercial (or should I say built-in?) debugger that I've used, and that includes gdb.
I am not a huge c++ on Windows guy though, so YMMV.
Here are a few guides that you may find helpful (and I am also going to include the beginner one, but please do not take that as an indictment of your skill level, I am including only for completeness).
These are all for VS2022:
C++ Debugging Tutorial: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/gett...
C++ Breakpoint Debugging: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/usin...
Breakpoint/Watch Expressions (pay attention to the debugger intrinsics): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/expr...
High Level Debugger Tour: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/debu...
VS2022 Debugging TOC: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/?vie...
My apologies if you've already found these references and they don't do you any good, but your issues just don't sound like the types of issues I've ever experienced with the debugger, and sometimes MS' documentation is just disorganized and incomplete.