I agree, when I've worked with UX at a few companies, I (dev) found myself in the funny situation of encouraging designers to not be distracted by the technology ("oh we should use Tailwind, antd components are cool", etc) and talk about what the actual design system is. What are the primitives, patterns, needs, etc.
90% of the time it was basically a theme, and we implemented using Bootstrap and its primitives/components were fine.
Yeah I’ve never been on a design system team (always wanted to), but I think it would require a technical lead to help keep the team focused. It’s admittedly very hard for a non-technical designer to understand what is and is not a concern for engineering, so I get why they would find themselves distracted.
The best design system around[0] operates entirely in the open. You can look through the history, discussions, PRs, framework-specific implementations and see why it's geared the way it is - and why it's incredibly successful.
For designers who wish to take part and contribute to this design system, does that mean they need to learn how to install nvm and all those requisite steps?
You can contribute by responding to the discussions in the backlog[0], by improving the actual distributed styles and code[1] or suggesting improvements to the documentation in the link I posted above.
Bigger changes need to be backed up with user research, evidence of user needs and accessibility reviews and checks.
90% of the time it was basically a theme, and we implemented using Bootstrap and its primitives/components were fine.