Storyboards are not being deprecated, and remain a great option for you to set up prototype cells with custom views inside the cell's
contentView (e.g. your own labels, image view, etc) which you position using Auto Layout.
Because a content configuration is a complete specification of the appearance of the content view, when you apply a content configuration to the cell, it replaces any existing customizations to the cell's
contentView — whether those customizations were done in a Storyboard, or in code. The content configuration you set to the cell does not just contain the image and text, it also contains many other properties that describe the styling and behavior of the content, and all of these properties are applied together as a whole. Once you apply the configuration to the cell, the configuration it is the source of truth that reflects what the cell is displaying.
If you are using configurations, and still want a visual preview of your UI without having to build & run your app, a great option is to use
Xcode Previews to display your cells (or the
UIListContentView by itself) in various states and with different configurations. Even if you are not using SwiftUI in your app, you can create Xcode Previews using SwiftUI to preview your UIKit-based cells and views (the SwiftUI code and previews are used only during development).
