I think its educational for a lot of people brought up with languages and infrastructure without this capability.
Then again I never debug in production these days, preferring logging and debugging replicas. It only takes one thread being shot to ruin your day (and your users).
I learned what jwdp stands for. Never bothered to research that.
As for remote debugging a hosted JVM, I would worry about opening a debug port like that to the interwebs. Doesn't this create another attack surface with which to undermine the JVM?
We use this most often to connect to a development environment which is running locally anyway, but you can achieve the same effect (without opening ports to the general internet!) with port forwarding over SSH; then you just connect to "localhost" on your selected port, which forwards to selected port on "localhost" on the remote server.
It probably goes without saying that you wouldn't enable this on production, in any case -- hitting a breakpoint wouldn't be nice to whoever hits it!
