[sunaden]

Author here, thanks for the feedback!

I fully agree - if I were to start a new project today, I would most certainly use an existing design system and tweak it.

We actually did use an existing system/framework at start called ant.design, but we slowly started replacing it. Many components had some kind of a quirk which did not let us use it the way we intended - resulting in various hacks on top of it. As I mentioned in another comment, the rest the design system "crafting" at Deepnote was mostly re-organizing elements and making sense of what we already had and unifying it. This reduced the scope of the work to be done by a lot.

So far maintaining the current design system and using it has not been a time sink, eager to see what the following months will bring.