The article's core claim is blunt: what most teams call a design system is not one. A real design system requires documented implementation logic, not just a shared component library or a Figma file.
The distinction matters because without that documentation, consistency degrades the moment the original builders leave. New contributors guess. Products drift. The system exists only in the heads of a shrinking group of people.
The full piece is worth reading for the classification framework it uses to separate genuine systems from collections of assets. If your team has components but no written rationale for how and why they connect, you are building on sand.
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