[gwn7]

I agree with the sentiment, but don't appreciate the way you put it (lacks nuance). I think it is obvious that developing custom design systems can sometimes give companies a competitive advantage, hence there might be a non-zero value here. Heavily depends on the product and the target audience.

In any case, the market has your answers. So many people are doing their own design systems. Can all this effort be caused by merely arrogance? There ought to be something else reinforcing this behavior.

[actionfromafar]

This reads eerily close to the just world fallacy. The market isn't perfect.

No, it's not arrogance driving people to do their own design system. But corporations engage in all sorts of dysfunctional (to the whole) rituals.

[cogman10]

I'll do you one better, the market doesn't care about competitive advantage.

If it did, then we'd not see every company adopting this year's technobabble to get a stock price bump. How many companies this year are chasing LLMs and AI even when it has absolutely nothing to do with their core product? How about a few years ago when everyone was after ML? A few years before that when it was setting up blockchains?

Heck, how many of these layoffs going around are due to the fact that every time a company does it they get a stock price bump?