Design Systems Are Treaties
After shipping four design systems, I've come to believe the Figma file is the easy part. The hard part is the politics.
Every design system I've worked on has eventually run into the same wall: the system is fine, the components are fine, but two teams refuse to use them in the same way.
The temptation is to write more documentation. To add more lint rules. To force compliance through process. None of it works for long. Systems are adopted, not enforced.
What works is treating the system like a treaty between teams: negotiated, mutually beneficial, occasionally renewed. The components are the artifacts of an agreement. Without the agreement, the components are just suggestions.
If you're starting a design system, spend less time on tokens and more time talking to the engineers who'll use it. The library is downstream of the relationship.