I feel like the biggest criticism here is that live-coding in presentations tend to be unrehearsed. That can be fixed by rehearsing it and shaking out the bugs ahead-of-time, thus avoiding the "impromptu debugging session".
Totally agree that it needs to be well-rehearsed. An alternative to being super well rehearsed is to record a video of the live coding and talk live over that, a technique I've used successfully in the past.
