I believe the comparison was not with text-based debuggers, but with the more mainstream Node.js debugging options that also provide Blink or Chrome DevTools UIs:

1. Node Inspector (https://github.com/node-inspector/node-inspector), the most prevalent Node.js debugging tool, at least until Node v6.3.0. And which also happens to be mentioned by Jam3/devtool in the Comparisons section.

2. Built-in Chrome DevTools debugging support as of node v6.3.0 (https://medium.com/@paul_irish/debugging-node-js-nightlies-w...). Simply by running:

> node --inspect foo.js