There are literally university courses which confidently state “Console logging is far more used and better so we won’t talk about a debugger here”!

Like sure, it’s very likely to be used far more, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t at least offer some courses or modules about proper use of a debugger…

Am I understanding that last part correctly?

[…] and actually zipping the file outside of the zipped directory helped a lot

Did they just automatically create a backup zip-bomb in their script‽