Comment by uzername

Our design team has been charged with making a refreshed, design system. That's all in Figma so far. Nothing has touched a real browser or a real device (tablet, phone). I've coached them to _try_ their design system in code sooner than later, to see if it even makes sense in real scenarios. I've coached them that they'll need multiple implementations.

At a technical level, there have been previous attempts for these shared design libraries with reusable components. We're mostly using react. The first generation the design system ended up putting all of these complex components like "Product Display" or "Order Builder" and so on, all driven by props. That resulted in prop explosion and increasingly unreasonable maintenance burdens. It also became effectively locked to the versions of React that were available when it was made - teams could not afford to upgrade either their own apps which caused the library to freeze. A second generation of repeated many of those same mistakes, not composable enough, too tied to a definite version of react, too tied to a definite version of mui, and so on. The tech piece, in addition to the people-problems, is just as hard and important too.

Adoption will be driven by funding, value and time.