I agree with your comparison to Webpack (and also brought back all of my pre-esbuild memories...). I've worked at some places where a simple component library repo has >100 LoC storybook config files and I was always confused why it had to be like that.

Thanks for your feedback. This is helping me a lot towards understanding what we want from a "component workshop" that perhaps Storybook and others (like Ladle) don't either have or do the way we want. :)