Most Products Don't Need a Design System. They Need Design Hygiene.

The design system has become one of the most over-prescribed solutions in the product design industry. What started as a genuinely useful tool for organizations operating at extraordinary scale has quietly become a default recommendation for teams that don't have the resourcing to build one properly — or the organizational maturity to maintain it. For most small to mid-size product teams, a full design system introduces more friction than it resolves. There's a lighter approach that delivers most of the consistency benefits at a fraction of the overhead. It's called design hygiene, and for the majority of products being built today, it's the right call.