I agree and was going to comment something similar: Like entropy, design systems are getting ever more complicated. This virtue of having infinitely updatable design systems is a bit lost. For most people this is an exercise that’s done extremely rarely, is difficult to advocate for because the ROI is perceived to be low, and there’s tons of stakeholders you have to align due to the risk to the brand.

Front end engineers love to opine over amazingly flexible design systems, though.

This is fair, I've also seen design systems grow in complexity. Sometimes for good reasons, but also because "design systems professionals will... systematize".

That said, it's not just about "updatability" of systems, it's in great part about scaling a design language across multiple surfaces, products, modes, locales, and sometimes even multiple brands.

The orthogonal complexity of design decisions can be pretty high, and does requires powerful interoperable tooling to handle. Hence the need for this methodology and a spec.

Yes, and also design changes never seem to align precisely with the parameters you anticipated at the beginning. I.e., you don’t just need to update one color variable, you need to update that color AND add a secondary accent color AND change the positioning of the logo with respect to the company name, etc.

> CSS didn't support constants and derived values for a long time, so a generation of web designers grew up thinking this is something quite difficult to achieve.

I think it's more that design tools didn't used to support constants like this. Now tools like Figma do, designers are taking advantage of them and figuring out how to best to share constants/tokens with developers.

Most web design is probably done by designers and not developers too, so it's not likely to be CSS variables (which have been available in CSS tooling like Sass for ages) that is driving this. I agree it doesn't need to be over complicated though.