PROPS ARE NOT A DESIGN SYSTEM

Summary from the TLDR Design newsletter

Inline styling — via Tailwind classes or style attributes — makes every component a one-off decision, breaking visual consistency, semantics, and maintainability. The proposed fix is defining styles once through named "variants" (complete, self-contained visual definitions) and "modifiers" (controlled variations like size), rather than overriding styles at the call site. Following this discipline across any UI kit naturally produces a real design system, turning scattered styling decisions into a reusable, consistent structure.