What goes into default Debian?

locate shouldn't be more than 24 hours out of date... and if you are looking for something more recent, you most likely created it and it's in your home directory... and you can find it quickly enough. But for the vast majority of the filesystem outside of your home directory, locate smokes find.

If I've done a lot of package installs or updates... I'll often run updatedb before using locate. The updatedb action usually only takes a second or two. So making locate as up-to-date as find, is still way, way faster than find.

Yes, there are feature differences because locate only matches file/dir names whereas find has a whole slew of properties you can search for. It does NOT need to be an either or... or one is better than the other. Use both, they are both great.