How do you ask for more clarity when you’re new to a team and project?

Hey all,

I have joined a new team a month ago as a frontend developer. I do have experience of around 4+ years and I have been working with this company from last 5 months. For my initial 3 months I was not working on core development but more like support/maintenance kinda work.

But since last one month I have been moved to a new team and now I am developing features. I have noticed sometimes that stories are not created with clarity as such and it is difficult to analyze the story until I start working on it. So, like in refinement I can't ask for more clarity because I am not aware about the whole project structure and what's all in there. And I will be most likely would ask questions when I start working on it and analyzing the work. But I feel like if I reach out to the team or lead then they could get annoyed or may think that why I didn't ask earlier about it. And why I committed to start working on it, until and unless I didn't know what the story was about.

I honestly had some very bad experiences from my last job, where it was a big problem to ask for clarity after starting to work on it. And I had to be very articulate and sycophant about it, in order to ask something. That team was very small and only 3 of us dev used to work.

So, if you're a team lead or someone who create stories. Do you hold the accountability of the details that get added in a story and understand the ambiguity present in it?

And as devs, how do you approach in situations like this where you wanna get more clarity of some task or features?