Missile storms are the mech anime equivalent of the Dragonball Z scenes where they shoot a million projectiles into a dust cloud only to be SHOCKED when the villain emerges unscathed.
Hathaways Flash has a great scene at the end battle where the opponent basically takes a missile storm to the face and it overwhelms him instead of some fantastical escape
It's pretty cool how some early-on anime had this idea and it's been a literal arms race ever since of trying to outdo each other in concept and execution.
There are a ton of other tropes in anime, but how many of them actually push the animators as hard as this one does?
As for air to air combat tactics, unleashing your full missile swarm all in one attack is not going to enhance the probability of a kill as much as spacing out continuous missile attacks on said target as it loses its advantage by expending energy to evade. A missile storm in a real fight would be when one uses AARAMS to target multiple bandits at once though and to continuously fire missile after missile on the target to force it to use evasive maneuvers until one hits, is how real air to air missile tactics would be employed.
SAMs in contrast have nearly unlimited ammo capacity and some pilots do need to dodge the equivalent of a missile swarm which is legit terrifying.
But it looks cool though.
Most of that is wrong from the in universe perspective and assumptions about reality
The first part is that missile storms, for cinematic reasons, are generally used against very agile targets or ones that have self defenses that can shoot down individual missiles easily. These would dodge or shoot down a small amount of missiles shot at them in staggered intervals. A real life jet would have problems though.
The other assumption about SAMs having anywhere near unlimited ammo is also wrong, as demonstrated by the emerging tactic of using drone swarms to overwhelm SAM defenses in the Ukraine war.
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