Thank you, that's a very interesting response, and also the complete opposite of my experience with this sort of thing!
In my experience, the design team is often even more component-driven than the dev team, with more interest in things right down to things like design tokens to specify consistent line widths. Whereas developers also use components to encapsulate design, but mainly use it to encapsulate behaviour or local state - say, a drop-down that needs a particular search functionality, or a breadcrumb component that needs to update as the page history changes.
Maybe you are just working with better designers than I have!
I find they all care about these things, but either their imagination or direction from above gets the best of them and it ruins the party.
Then you are left with change requests that don't fit with the existing design system - a bunch Lego blocks with nobody that wants to play with them anymore.
I would say - on good days - my experience matches yours. On the other days... you are basically being asked to rewrite entire pages to conduct experiments. At that point I have to ask - is the Design request unreasonable, or did we make the wrong decision and prematurely optimize for components instead of just sticking with a more malleable template?
In my experience, the design team is often even more component-driven than the dev team, with more interest in things right down to things like design tokens to specify consistent line widths. Whereas developers also use components to encapsulate design, but mainly use it to encapsulate behaviour or local state - say, a drop-down that needs a particular search functionality, or a breadcrumb component that needs to update as the page history changes.
But thanks for your perspective.