just curious whether anyone uses [available] step debugging [tools] in either acf or lucee nowadays or whether it's considered passe or not as useful as it was in the past

Nope, haven't used them in a very long time. Not using an editor that supports them, don't want to enable RDS. I haven't thought about them for years, so it's possible some of my reasons are obsolete or less relevant than they used to be, but I get by just fine without the.

safe to say then that you wouldn't imagine yourself using one nowadays unless you're really in the shit with something yes? i concur with your other points

Correct. and even if I'm out in the weeds with something I can't figure out, I'll find a way to see what I need to see, even if I have to spit stuff out on the screen that doesn't really belong there. Ideally I'd show that debug stuff only to me. Really depends on what I'm chasing.

Love step debugging - do not love the weight of CF Builder that comes with it 😕 Wonder if Adobe could pull that functionality out of Builder and make it a stand alone VS Code extension... probably not but wishful thinking... cfdump still works 🙂

A while back, I actually wrote a session-based logging tool to help snoop when needed. It's pretty useful, but comes with caveats: 1. It's totally possible to take down your server by logging the entire known universe, since the log is in your session 2. You need to understand how it works, like by refence vs by value, and other behaviors I've considered putting it up on GitHub, but I really don't have the cycles to support or maintain it. Sing out if that's of interest to you and I'll think about it.