At first, I was confused by what OP meant, too, but I think the point is that if you can mock your data easily, then getting your app into the desired state is straightforward enough that Storybook becomes unnecessary. At least, that's how I interpreted it.

> the play feature beats E2E if you want to show a smooth demo for clients/fellow devs

We actually haven't used this at all, but it's a neat feature.

The tradeoffs we evaluated were:

- Storybook allows to develop components in isolation, but requires to structure your components in a very specific way that is detrimental to how React works (see my other comment with the Oxide in the thread).

- MSW allows to develop your whole app in isolation but it lacks all of the bells and whistles that Storybook has (e.g. testing, various plugins, demo, discoverability of the components).

But in general, our use case is developing an internal SPA using Tailwind, so we don't exactly have a component library that we need to develop in isolation. I can see the value of Storybook if that's the case for your team. Many other companies maintain their homegrown UI library that could benefit from all of the features of Storybook, so it makes sense for them.