The other reply covers it but I want to slice it slightly differently. I see two things that are different here. One is mocking at the HTTP boundary rather than mocking, e.g., function return values or modules or whatever. That's certainly not revolutionary (I know people do it with rspec and I'm sure plenty of test frameworks do it too), and in theory you could build your mock server with any tool that lets you build a server. But people don't usually do this, and when they do they tend to do it bit by bit for each test rather than thinking about it as mocking the entire API. So for example, in my mock API, my POST creating a project actually creates a project in a mock database, and then when I list projects, I can see what I just created. So I can test the UI by doing exactly what you would do manually — create the thing and see that it shows up where it's supposed to. All of that is built independently of my test for that feature, and it works for all the tests I write — I don't have to think about mocking API bits for a particular test.

Worth a read: https://kentcdodds.com/blog/stop-mocking-fetch

The other thing that's unusual is running this mock in a Service Worker, which means it can run in the browser. That's pretty cool and pretty unique to this tool. But the Mock part is about running the same server outside of the browser i.e., in Node (or now Deno or Bun), which means you can use it for unit tests. So I think the thing you have to see here is the synthesis of all that in one thing — it's one mock server that (because it's written in JS) can run both in the browser and on the server. I admit it doesn't sound that great until you try it, but it enables some cool and surprisingly useful stuff like the live preview I linked.

From my understanding this isn’t (just) mock data, it’s an entire mock backend that runs inside the browser. To be able to simulate that with zero dependencies outside the browser does simplify a lot of testing scenarios.