I remember auditing a company’s product once, a decently sized web and mobile application, only to learn that a certain “expand” button was not only using multiple shades of the primary color, but also had a changing border radius across the two platforms. Documenting that, I was unaware that changing the button to be correct and unified everywhere could take days to implements, as a poor developer would have to sift through each application, find every variant of the button and correct each of them, one-by-one. Long story short, they decided that these errors were just small imperfections, which in turn, were never fixed.
Thankfully, we don’t have to live with those small imperfections anymore.
Design tokens are here to save us all perfectionist developers and designers alike, allowing us to manage all properties, colors, and components from a single source of truth.