As a dev working with designers who have embraced the Figma token generation, I have to say the whole effort seems ill-conceived.

The sheer amount of problems faced with tokens going missing, unclear rationales, endless updates and follow-up, coordination, etc makes me yearn for days where designers dropped a design file and devs figured out if tokenizing made sense.

Plus, tokens are only as good as the deeper design decisions, but that abstraction always has consequences. Not to mention the performance impact of css vars.

Again, it feels as if the idea has been stretched so designers can change code tokens at will, but to do this would require an insane amount of tokenization that in a sufficiently large code base would become unmanageable. Our latest token count is nearing 5k unique tokens, and that only covers maybe 2% of custom css we have to use to achieve the desired outcome. For me, it’s a net negative.

Thank you for sharing – and good luck, as this is a tough situation to be in.

Some teams neglect to consider the entire lifecycle of a token and introduce too many, too early. They can bring a ton of value, but it has to be weighed against the learning curve and maintenance burden.

The industry is full of very eager folks who get into design systems but were never on the receiving end of one, and who sometimes overdo it.

Like I said in another comment: "systems people will systematize".

Design tokens are not the cure nor the problem, but like any approach, it can go wrong when taken too far or is owned by folks too siloed from engineering to realize their full power.