Component libraries promise consistency and deliver a museum of half-fitting parts. A defence of building the few primitives you actually need.
The pitch for a component library is consistency. The reality, on most small teams, is a sprawling collection of components — most used once, many slightly wrong, all of them now your responsibility to maintain.
01 — Primitives over partsBuild the floor, not the furniture
What actually buys consistency is a small set of primitives — spacing, type, color, a stack and a cluster — plus the discipline to compose from them. A handful of well-named tokens beats a hundred components you're afraid to touch.
Consistency comes from constraints, not from a folder full of components.
We keep maybe a dozen primitives per project and compose everything else in place. When something genuinely repeats three times, it earns promotion to a component. Not before.