One common need that is a sad state of affairs in the Node world is performance tooling. It's available and competent professionals should invest in it once it becomes necessary but is a pain in the ass to setup and run.
Some of the best programmers advocate for printf over debuggers...
And some of the crappiest programmers run around the debugger for hours with no idea what could be wrong in the program, stepping blindly here and there...
Yes, js devs use debuggers and have for years. Firebug was created and popularized for browser js 10 years ago[1]. Node.js was released 7 years ago, got a debug option one year later using node debugger. It was CLI based and a bit shit. Tools which leveraged Node's debug protocol and Chrome's developer tools (node-inspector) for example were started 5 years ago[2]. Most recently some group associated (maybe on?) the Chrome team started creating a cleaner debug protocol and integrating directly with the Chromium project[3]. That's become the gold standard and is the standard way of debugging for Node 7+[4]. VSCode uses that protocol to offer debugging directly from the editor.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebug_(software)
2. https://github.com/node-inspector/node-inspector
Firebug quickly became the defacto later on. But telling your average web designer about breakpoints, stepping over and stepping into would cause their eyes to glaze over.
Maybe there was some way I didn't know about. There's the 'inspect' flag in node 6 now that prints out a link you can copy into your chrome browser to debug server node code.
