Struggling with Hardhat debugging — am I missing something beyond console.log? 🤔

I’ve started building my first few smart contracts and use Hardhat for testing. But every time something fails, I just keep adding console.log everywhere until it magically works. It feels messy and I’m never sure why it failed in the first place.

I’ve heard seniors say debugging is about validating state changes, not just reading logs — but I don’t fully get how to do that. How do you all actually debug smart contracts efficiently?

What routine or habit helped you stop chasing ghosts in tests?