Welcome to my issue report, after spending ~10 hours investigating mysterious browser hangs on specific stories.
I knew something was weird after bumping storybook version for my component's repo. Some stories simply hanged the browser. So I dug and dug... Narrowing things down. Eliminating hypophyses one after the other. Simplifying it to the bare minimum.
Please clone, install dependencies and run storybook
There are two stories (in a single story file), and some explanations in the source-code. Once live, click to switch between the stories and you'll notice the performance issue on the "slow" story.
I've narrowed it down to @storybook/addon-essentials, which is a common addon collection, and within it
to the docs & controls addons. When both are disabled, this issue does not occur.
For some reason, this only happens for stories which are wrapped with:
const storyWrap = storyFn => (_, storyArgs) => storyFn(storyArgs)
storiesOf(...).add('Render slow', storyWrap(() => ...