Every Design System Eventually Becomes the Thing It Was Built to Prevent

There's a pattern nobody talks about. You build a design system to stop the chaos. Designers stop fighting over button styles. Engineers stop reinventing dropdowns. Everyone's relieved. Then, eighteen months later, you have a new kind of chaos — a 900-component library nobody fully understands, a Figma file only three people can open without crashing their machine, and a Slack channel that processes 200 messages a day about whether the "compact" variant of a card should have 12px or 16px padding.