Can't reuse Babel plugins from Storybook

I'm trying hard to add Storybook to a CRA(CO) app with some custom Babel plugins, but no matter what I do, I get complaints from react-docgen, stating there's no proposal for the pipeline operator:

WARN Failed to parse [...]/src/utils/Alerts.js with react-docgen. Please use the below error message and the content of the file which causes the error to report the issue to the maintainers of react-docgen. https://github.com/reactjs/react-docgen
SyntaxError: ./src/utils/Alerts.js: Topic reference is used, but the pipelineOperator plugin was not passed a "proposal": "hack" or "smart" option. (21:60)

  19 |  }
  20 |
> 21 |  static #find = id => store.getState() |> getAlerts |> find(#, { id })
     |                                                             ^
  22 |

Unfortunately, this is a private project, so I can't provide reproducible examples :(
But I hope someone can find some jarring issue on the config files below, or any other idea brighter than Perplexity Pro could give me through the whole afternoon and night of this day.... 😞
I couldn't find a way to try to feed Babel configs directly to react-docgen without duplicating the Babel plugins and causing other issues.

Storybook version is 7.6.20 (because we're stuck in Node v16 for a while), but react-docgen is 7.1.1.

//craco.config.js
const webpack = require('webpack')

module.exports = {
	babel: { loaderOptions: { configFile: true } },
	webpack: {
		configure: (webpackConfig) => {
			webpackConfig.module.rules.push({
				test: /\.pem$/i,
				type: 'asset/source',
			})
			return webpackConfig
		},
		plugins: {
			add: [
				new webpack.DefinePlugin({ __SENTRY_DEBUG__: false })
			],
		},
	},
}

//.storybook/main.js
/** @type { import('@storybook/react-webpack5').StorybookConfig } */
export default {
  stories: ["../src/**/*.mdx", "../src/**/*.stories.@(js|jsx|mjs|ts|tsx)"],
  addons: [
    "@storybook/addon-links",
    "@storybook/addon-essentials",
    "@storybook/preset-create-react-app",
    "@storybook/addon-onboarding",
    "@storybook/addon-interactions",
  ],
  framework: {
    name: "@storybook/react-webpack5",
    options: {
      builder: { useSWC: false },
    },
  },
	// typescript: { reactDocgen: false }, //no clue why, but this can't get the correct pipelineOperator settings from Babel
	babel: config => ({
		...config,
		loaderOptions: {
			...config.loaderOptions,
			configFile: true
		},
	}),
  docs: {
    autodocs: "tag",
  },
  staticDirs: ["../public"],
};

//.babel.config.js
module.exports = {
	'plugins': [
		'@babel/plugin-proposal-do-expressions',
		'@babel/plugin-transform-class-static-block',
		['@babel/plugin-proposal-pipeline-operator', { proposal: 'hack', topicToken: '#' }],

		//future ideas in case they seem useful
//            "@babel/plugin-proposal-throw-expressions"
//            "@babel/plugin-proposal-export-default-from"
	],
}

Start by comparing .storybook/main.js, .babel.config.js, and craco.config.js to determine which Babel configuration react-docgen receives. Reproduce the pipeline-operator parsing failure in a public or minimal setup, then verify that Storybook documentation generation honors the configured proposal and topic token without conflicting configuration.