What about looking at the opposite or extremes?
What is the worst story out there? And what makes it a bad story? What is the shortest story recognizable as a story?
Like toddlers telling stories. They make me groan, but why? I think it's all the extraneous information. It literally takes away from the story. So there's something about a line or thread that's important
Or Hemingway's six word story "For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn."
And a six word non-story. "Today was the same as yesterday."
So it feels like the key to a story is a change happening with at least implied characters.
If story is a chain (or a net) of frames,
than to be "bad" it needs to be loose, weak.
Yet to remain a story it needs a connection between its parts, so:
a) more than one frame
b) those frames are connected