I can only speak for myself...but at the time I was behind the eight-ball, I was young...late thirties. I had hoped railroad work would provide stability (it didn't; it depends on whether the industry is in one of its periodical upheavals) and I wanted to look to buy a home.
First, paying off the debt, instead of slithering out of it, taught me a few things. Even though I paid it off with a settlement...I had the psychological instruction of being chained, and then liberated. So when I DID shop for a house, it was priced a third of what I could have qualified for. My house payment, including taxes, was $275 a month. Of course, deferred maintenance was on top of that...
But. I learned some important things. AND my credit was top-tier. I'm about 780 on the credit rating, even now with a low income.
Finally, there's the moral principle, that of paying back what you borrowed. Yeah, I know the banks are all run by crooks (didn't know it back then) but they did make the money available to me. I took it promising to pay back...in fact, I was laughing at the Sovereign Citizen movement, where these rubes discovered somehow that reading the Constitution upside down, showed that money was a fraud and thus, they didn't have to pay back real money when loaned fraudulent money. Or something like.
My age is showing...but I'm finding, now, that honesty and integrity are worth a lot, in terms of self-esteem.
