Roads certainly limit where one can drive, but the alternative is pretty disastrous.

As with anything: there is a time and place. Design systems are wildly powerful for scaling, creating a cohesive language across a brand or product, and moving quickly.

Just because you have a design system doesn't mean the buck stops there. You can keep building new roads if you know where it is you need to go that the existing roads won't take you.

What they are demonstrating is clearly for experimenting layouts and screens with their own predefined elements. With broken up elements and basic design kits like paper CSS, this would be a very useful tool for quick prototyping.

At some point unselfconscious design cultures must give up some of their innocence if they want to mature into self conscious design cultures/systems[1].

1: “Notes on the Synthesis of Form” by Christopher Alexander.