I found out that 3.17 disables Xdebug by default (ref #1560). Since I very very often use Xdebug to help write the contexts, I need step debugging to be always enabled when working locally with it. In CI, it would usually make sense to disable Xdebug, but not for local development.

I'd like to propose either reverting the default behaviour of disabling Xdebug, or providing some way of always not disabling Xdebug without having to specify --xdebug every time, e.g. with an environment variable, maybe something in behat.php or similar. It makes sense for tools like phpstan/rector/composer to disable Xdebug, but IMO not in Behat; we are writing test code with Behat, and just like writing tests with phpunit/Codeception, devs should be able to step through that test code. I personally would rather see something like a CI option to improve performance, e.g. vendor/bin/behat --no-xdebug or similar.