When Vite optimizes dependencies (as they are requested), it hard reloads which causes both a bad loading behavior in Storybook:

As well as potential flake in Vitest:

Seems like the issue started in alpha 16. There is a bugfix from alpha 17 to make Storybook run though, so whoever works on this can investigate from that version if they prefer. I suspect it has to do with this change.

There is a reproduction you can check at https://github.com/yannbf/inkline-sb-qa on the sb-85-qa branch.