It seems to me that it's impossible to tell any realistic story. The point of stories is abstraction such that we can see something non-obvious. "All models are

It seems to me that it's impossible to tell any realistic story. The point of stories is abstraction such that we can see something non-obvious. "All models are wrong, some models are useful." So to me the appropriate use of SD models is not "perfectly model the vastness we are confronted with", but "find a model we can use for a while to get insights that we can use to try out possible improvements". Stock-and-flow models can indeed do that with software development sometimes. If people are saying that X is the One True Way to Think, yeah, that'd be wrong no matter the X. But from what you wrote, I'm not seeing that.