Life is in phases! At the stage of your rising, you might be living in debt and it's a bit understandable at that time. But you have to grow to a point where you deliberately decide that you will live a debt-free life.
It's very possible and there are a lot of people out there that are doing so well for themselves without being indebted to anyone.
If you are also contented wit the little you have, you won't be in debt.
Of course, there are a lot of reasons why people take loan funds from people ranging from solving life challenges to using them for business ventures.
It becomes very bad when you take a loan for personal consumption but if you take it for a business venture, it becomes a reasonable risk which to me is not a bad debt.
The problem is that, when you accept debt soon in your life, then it is more difficult to escape, unless you have a good plan and everything goes according to it, which is not easy: people get unemployed, interest rates rise, cars break, renovations at home must be done...
About what you said, some people think that freedom is the ability to consume whatever they want whenever they want, regardless the money they have, so, for them, living in debt is a means to an end. They are different ways of seeing life, and in many western cultures it's the latter the most common one.