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.