I recall reading something about money is essentially debt, but not necessarily debt in the way you think it.

If the world had no net debt, there would be no money and barter would be pointless. An ideal society like that is entirely communistic, and while that does look ideal on paper, human desire ruined it and we got Marxism.

Ideally, yes, everything would be free and nobody would care. People care, we’re never reaching that point. The closest we can get is capitalism, which is effectively a trade of service by invoking a medium which implied indebtedness. The cycle of debt and non-debt effectively works as a bank functions: you recieve medium, and in exchange, they want compensation. Money works the same way, you provided effort to someone, and they compensate you with the medium, which you may trade for products which have been determined to have taken equal effort.

tl;dr: Unless you remove humans, communism isn’t working. Ever.