I have an example of needing to do this…
A few weeks ago after an update/restart my frontend wouldn’t load (of course I did a config check first just like every other time!) and I started getting errors in my log about the HACS component (along with a lot of other related/unrelated things). And of course we all know that the first recommended troubleshooting step is to remove the offending custom component (it says so right there in the first lines of the log).
The problem was that I had HACS configured via the UI at some point and because I didn’t have access to the front end I couldn’t remove it via the UI. I was then pretty much stuck. It literally took several hours of troubleshooting/editing the .storage files to purge them of anything HACS related/etc. until it was all back up and running again. I even eventually had to create an entirely different virgin HA docker container and added things back a bit at a time from my original config until I “found” the issue.
So…without being able to edit those mostly not-easily-readable JSON files and then knowing how things were supposed to work in the first place because I usually configure (mostly…) everything in yaml I would have ended up needing to completely restart my main config from scratch. And even with my experience with things HA related I was still unsure about where all the bits of the HACS integration were spread out in the .storage files.
I still don’t know why things got broken like they did but I’m fairly confident in saying that if I was one of the newly-targeted “non-tech savvy” users I would have been completely lost on how to proceed to fix things. And having everything configured in the “black-box” of the hidden .storage files only adds to that.
And since there is no “customer service” that the non-tech savvy user can reach out to for help they will come here. Then we are supposed to try to help them fix their broken systems by telling them…what exactly? To use SSH/SAMBA (which they probably don’t know how to use and haven’t ever got it set up) and go into their .storage files and edit those un-editable files that are written in unreadable JSON and to delete every reference to some UI configured integration that might be spread across several files? But "oh, yeah…make sure you don’t mess up the syntax of those mysterious files because if you do all hope is lost for ever fixing it without starting completely from scratch. But, hey, no pressure. “Wait, you didn’t make a backup?” Of course not. And why would they since the new target user is not tech savvy…