I’m not sure im reading well into your criticism about user stories, it sounds like you dislike how they are used in your company.

I find user stories critical because they are the lowest common denominator for product/sales/dev/biz etc, everyone gets them, can agree if this functionality will or will not he in release X and pretty much would set expectation correctly between all parties.

Additionally, moving down the dev pipeline, once you have wireframes / more specific designs, you can go over the user stories to make sure they are all supported.