Well, obviously that will depend on what defaults (and how many?!) a developer is going to change".

https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/profiles.html#default-profiles

And the debug (dev) profile has its uses. It's just not necessarily the best for typical day-to-day development in many projects.

I actually use two steps of profile inheritance, with -cl (for Cranelift) inheriting from a special release-dev profile. A developer does not have to be limited in how they modify or construct their profiles.