It is pretty interesting to read a take about the story mode from a casual player outside of the fighting game ecosystem (you in this case, which is pretty evident from what you mention about not really looking into training or online, which is fine), as that definitely seems to be the intended target audience for story modes like this.

Although at the same time its funny that you point out the difficulty (at least from what you played - not sure if it has difficulty levels or extra challenges) seems to boil down to "just punch back and you'll win", which once again seems to be catered towards players that are unfamiliar with fighting games, yet it does stick out to read that even the boss characters were possible to beat with button mashing lol

And I only mention that because of how Mortal Kombat bosses before (I think even in MK9 this was still the case, or at least there was a special challenge on the tower that really lived up to the infamy) were anything but merciful, either through gimmicks (like Onaga in Deception requiring to destroy some orbs on the arena to beat him IIRC) or just through raw "I'm reading your inputs, now die" (this is basically classic MK1-MK4 modus operandi, and likely some of it remained in future games).

But arguably the funniest thing is to read that the story in the "Story Mode" (which should be important for obvious reasons) doesn't have much to write about. To this day the only cutscene I remember finding about online was when Liu Kang visited Johnny Cage and he just said "what in the actual f-" before being cut off 😂

Anyhow, well done covering your experience with this one, was a fun read :)