The breaking point I was reviewing a pull request last Tuesday. A developer on my team was trying to implement a new theme switcher for our dashboard. They had imported a massive JSON file of design tokens from our repository. Then they wrote a giant JavaScript context provider to swap out the values dynamically on the client side. I left a comment asking why they didn't just use native CSS variables. They replied that our design system pipeline only exported SCSS variables and raw JSON. That moment really cemented a thought I've been having for a long time. If you build products for the web, CSS variables are the only design token format you should care about. Let's look at how most teams handle design tokens right now. A designer updates a colour in Figma. An automated script pulls that data via an API. The script runs it through a massive transformation pipeline. Then it spits out a dozen different files. You get SCSS variables. You get Less variables. You get a JavaScript object.…