A lot of programming jobs just need someone who can follow directions, not someone very skilled. It's the digital equivalent putting together IKEA furniture instead of being the person doing all the design work to ensure things fit together and the directions are simple to follow.

The most common way I've seen people try to figure out what went wrong is sprinkling stuff like "console.log("Here1"), console.log("Here2") throughout the code until they figure out which "Here" statement wasn't printed, then they start making random changes to values until the error reflects the changes that they made, then they check stackoverflow, if there aren't any results, they'll paste the error message with no context, having learned nothing in the process. It's pretty common in any field where you can get by knowing "what" to do, vs "why" to do something. I've seen the same thing teaching Linux classes where someone throws up their hands and gives up because they tried to cat a file and it said "error: no such file or directory", but they just saw "error", and decided it was too difficult.

There are certain people that just don't have developed critical thinking skills and will shut down the minute something goes different than expected. I have dealt with a few of those types of people in my career and it is incredibly frustrating. The best thing you can do for them is not to help them in the way they want, by giving them the answer, but by making them do some of the grunt work on their own before they even come to you. I ask a lot of questions about what they are seeing and if they can't answer them then I make them go back until they can. Simple things like "what have you searched for regarding this", "what does the error message say" in order to get them in the habit of actually starting to look into their own issues.

The obvious answer is they don't figure out what went wrong, they tweak the program until the problem goes away for a while.