really wish you would follow up with at least a brief description of what you consider to be effective use of a debugger

I can't speak for tye, but here's a couple of ways that I occasionally use a debugger.

• Understanding code. If I've been handed a big ball of mud sans tests then the debugger is a handy tool for understanding how the bugger runs. Although these days I tend to use Devel::Cover first to give me an overview of what's going on.
• Exploratory testing. Poking at the code to see if I can make it fail and then go write a failing test. I've not use it myself yet, but Devel::TestEmbed looks like a nice little tool to make this task easier.

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