Could you show a screenshot?
Here's a recording of using GDB's TUI mode: https://s.mort.coffee/d/vid/gdb-tui-demo.mp4
Note that I'm not a GDB pro, I just recently started trying to use it more instead of printf, so there are probably lots of stuff I didn't show off. (For example, I wish I'd shown the `bt` command to print stack traces).
Another thing that's worth noting is that with GDB, if your program crashed and generated a coredump, you can use GDB to look at how everything was when it crashed, just like if you were debugging a running program. This is extremely useful on for example embedded systems where you don't have GDB installed, or when the crash is hard to reproduce.
I don't know if you've tried it, but whenever you have a bit of time try Visual Studio's (or even Visual Studio Code's) debugger. They're among the best visual debuggers out there. Or IntelliJ's.
You see directly all the variables as you step through code, you can see array contents directly, they're super discoverable, etc.
It's such a shame that there's no glory (or money) to be had in designing CLI/TUIs. I also get the impression that it would be really hard to change things, OSS maintainers have a reputation for being very stubborn about workflow changes (sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not) :(
As for the data visualizers, as mentioned, with Java and .NET I can do it with a bit of annotations and the debugger takes it from there.
Or in C++'s case when using Visual Studio, a bit of XML describing the metadata.
BTW: In GDB, all commands have shortcuts i.e. 'b'=='break'. (Saves a lot of time).