I agree with you. To just offer a counterpoint, I sometimes see quotes like this one:

  But plenty of economists looked at the economic hole left by the 2008 financial crisis,
  and concluded the stimulus policies on the table weren't nearly big enough to fill it.
  The size of the hole is all that matters.
  Whatever level of deficit spending is required to fill it is the right level of deficit spending.[1]

or this one:

  We need the government to be out there borrowing money because of the long-term investments it's making in our economy[2]

The line of reasoning seems to be

1) The government is special because it can go to extreme measures to repay loans if necessary (i.e., print more money or raise taxes)

2) The reliability of the government means that it can borrow at a low rate (say, 3%) and make investments that are worth far more than that (say, 10%).

Put those together, and the government's borrowing amounts to a net benefit to society.

This argument reminds me of the 'then a miracle occurs' comic [3]. It doesn't hold water because

1) The extreme measures are very harmful - they cause high inflation and hardship amongst taxpayers.

2) Even if we accept that government investment makes a good return (a highly questionable assertion), that return does not go to the government. If the government borrows money to build a new road, then there is no doubt some economic benefit, but the government does not receive that benefit, and they are on the hook for the repayment anyway. So government spending does represent a pure cost - not an "investment". And in any case, interest payments represent investment that can no longer happen.

I would also point out that back when we ran briefly ran a surplus in the late 1990s, economists were not exclaiming about how terrible this was, or how paying off the debt represented a missed opportunity or a catastophe in the making. Everyone agreed at that time that surpluses were good, and that paying down the debt was good. The current "this is fine" thinking smacks of economists who have a predisposition to accept and justify the status quo, whether it is objectively good or not.

So all of that is to say that I'm with you - government debt is bad. We are in danger of some combination of insolvency, default, or very high inflation. And once we enter that spiral it will be impossible to get out of it without permanent damage to the economy and the global standing of the US (such as it is).

[1] https://theweek.com/articles/618419/why-americas-gigantic-na...

[2] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/bonds/us-debt-econo...

[3] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sidney+Harris+comic+miracle+occurs...