A teammate had been staring at a stuck request for days. We sat down together, opened a trace, and solved it in an hour. That moment — watching the confusion melt into an "oh, that's what's happening" — was more rewarding than any architecture win.
Tracing gives you instant x-ray vision into distributed systems. But the bigger win was sharing that "aha" moment. Once one person gets it, they teach the next person, who teaches the next. Teaching tools is compounding interest — every engineer you upskill pays it forward tenfold.