Comment by gyomu

> I’ve never really understood the need to build a full fidelity reproduction of the layout systems a design is targeting.

Well, you wrote why right before:

> As a dev that does a lot of his own design

You understand the whole, so you don't need lossy abstractions to connect the ends. When roles are specialized and people only understand part of the context in which they're working, they need ways to communicate about the whole thing.

Tools like Figma fill those sort of gaps, that tend to occur in organizations with dozens/hundreds of employees, with the need to quickly onboard frequent new hires, etc.