The floating bars help the viewer to understand that each element is incremental and the ends represent the running sum.
Did you know its super easy to make waterfall charts in MS Excel now? These used to require a lots of formatting and careful structuring of your data, but now its a predefined chart type option in Excel and Power BI.
In Tableau, you can also make various kinds of waterfall charts using the table calcs, but its still much more manual. Here’s a link to instructions for one on Tableau Public from @Visualistics:
https://lnkd.in/gR6T99Cy.
I found it because they also have a Super Mario Bros example:
https://lnkd.in/gXNf4J_t
Carragee Consulting 
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