In my experience, it's a superior approach for code you wrote yourself in a repeatable crash. You have the whole programming language at your disposal for building a condition corresponding to your bug, and any kind of data dumping.

I fall back on debuggers when the environment is hostile: Half understood code from someone else, unreliable hardware (like embedded), or debugging memory dumps.

But before both, the initial approach is thinking deep and hard, and reviewing all available evidence like logs. If this is not enough, I try to add better troubleshooting abilities for the future.