I read it as dealing with applications you only get shell access to and can't forward ports.

I think it would be interesting to view this from a different angle. Perhaps "Lots of people who know of debuggers still use printf debugging, maybe they're not all wrong and there are advantages that aren't so clear."

Good print statements can become future logging entries for when software ships and debugging statements need to be turned on without source code access.

“All these senior/staff FAANG folks are using a different tool than the one I regard as essential.”

There are a couple of ways to resolve this conundrum, and you seem to be locked on the less likely one.

What if… that weren’t an essential skill?

I'm so used to bouncing between environments my code's running in (and which project I'm working on) that I tend to just assume I don't have debugger access, or at least don't have it configured for that environment, even when I do. Like I'm just in the habit of not reaching for it because so often it's not actually there. It rarely matters much anyway (though when it does, yeah, it really does).

I'm surprised that you can get that far without seeing value in print debugging.

Imagine I posted the bell curve meme with "print debugging" on both ends.

set -x