I've edited my OP and hopefully what I'm saying is more clear.

If the entire ecosystem is your IDE, you're not "Turning Sublime Text into a Lightweight Python IDE".

I don't know how else to phrase this to make it clear that I'm not attacking, denigrating, claiming inferior, etc., composite workflows like vim + GDB. But if you get to an article that says XYZ is now your IDE, and it offers a piss-poor debugging experience unless you leave XYZ, then that article is not turning XYZ into an IDE.