You are talking about what is (or is equivalent to) printf-style debugging; if you use an actual debugger, you can step over function calls, you’ve got to do more work manually setting breakpoints to do the equivalent with undifferentiated streams of code in a long function.
So, you add a command to your debugger that lets you step over a "block" (a sequence of statements surrounded by braces -- the analog to Lisp's PROGN and Scheme's BEGIN) and before you debug the undifferentiated stream of many statements, you factor it into a handful of statements -- without introducing any new function names -- some of which are blocks.
No, what I'm talking about is how to narrow a problem down. The medium you use to accomplish that is flexible.
I'm a little confused as you why you think clicking step-over 20 times to get out of the std::lib is better than just moving the mouse down 20 lines and adding another break.
So again, this feels like we're back at "this is a matter of preference".
