My very modest claim to "fame" is having founded the Elastic UI Framework [1]. My experience with these kinds of design systems taught me two lessons:
1. You'll iterate towards the most useful version of your design system in the least amount of time if maintainers spend time consuming it, and vice versa.
2. Code is the source of truth, in the form of the component library. It's an unhelpful fiction to treat the non-code design system (whether that's in Figma, Sketch, or wherever) as the source of truth. This is because people build out new parts of the UI by copying, pasting, and modifying the code of the existing UI. If you want to make a change to the design system, it has to go into the code to make a difference.