Are there no good UI experiences you can bolt onto gdb? Do Emacs/Vim not have nice modes that take some of the pain away?

I've no real experience with using gdb - my main debugger usage has been on the JVM or using old Borland debuggers on Win32. Are there no good open source user-friendly debuggers out there?

I tend to develop software interactively with a REPL where I can so if a good debugger can give you something akin to that experience I'd be very tempted to jump ship from emacs to VSCode to try it for languages like C/C++.