It's worth mentioning that vim has added debugger integration support as a plugin, but that plugin is available with vim by default, you just need to enable it. It's not perfect but it's usable - you can set breakpoints visually and save/load them, you can step debug inside your code window (gdb is actually running in another vim window and can be controlled directly) and you can see the value of expressions in your code window.
This is a nice guide to it: https://www.dannyadam.com/blog/2019/05/debugging-in-vim/