I don’t want to make too many assumptions but it really feels like this summary of “design tokens” is just talking about human language https://www.producthunt.com/posts/report-design-system-insights-on-tokens
“Just” is definitely the wrong word here — I don’t mean to imply that it’s easy, or remedial work. What I mean is that “design tokens” are a language for communicating intent between disparate parts of a system.
By definition, that’s complex and nuanced work. It’s an attempt to make explicit and dependable something that has (in most publishing systems) been implicit and inconsistent. It faces all the challenges of language.
Calling it “design tokens” is useful because it makes clear what the purpose of the constructed language is: to communicate information that informs the design system.
The challenges I’m seeing lurking in the Design System Slack aren’t signs that “tokens” aren’t yet fully baked as a concept, it’s that clearly describing the implicit and explicit information and decisions that drive a design is itself really, really complicated.