The point of any debate is to find “truth” (loaded term, so in quotes). If you’re not arguing for truth, you’re a showman - one might even say a lier. “Practicing” that is practicing to lie.

What these debates do is the opposite of searching for truth, they are only searching for cheap points. They operate on a completely different plane. Even though they claim to be super logical, they are not.

Do you get similarly outraged by people who do weight training because “they didn’t actually need to pick up those heavy things”

And that’s a bad analogy. Really bad. My point is not, that the exercise is the (root) problem, but the tournament, if we want to stay in that flawed analogy. Seriously, show me only a single instance of a debate in the larger public sphere where there was an actual search for a deeper truth and not just cheap shots. You won’t find any. Why? Because both sides were trained to only use a ton a rhetorical devices to deconstruct the sentence structure of the opponent, and not to even think about the problem behind it. To create a proper analogy: Debating is like a ChatGPT, ChatGPT will happily deconstruct your argument why fnortification is superior to parallex zonkowskication, even though both concepts don’t exist. Why? Because is doesn’t care for anything even thruth like, it’s objective is to deconstruct a string of words - not more.

The entire practice of this type of debate is finding psychological tricks to create the illusion of knowledge, and I find that deeply unsettling.