I’ve worked in a tiny startup as the sole UX designer, in a cross-functional team where I did web design and hand-coding, and in enterprise software teams, including for an intranet.

I am honestly puzzled at a suggestion that designers should learn about design tokens, abstractions, and React/Angular/Vue. The only way I see that working in a real-world business setting is if the engineering team sets up an environment where designers can prototype in an environment that mimics production— and that they actually work with abstractions. In a large company with legacy architecture, at least in my experience, designers could know all the code and css best practices in the world, but organizationally, they are disconnected from production code and the engineering/IT team doesn’t communicate with or even sit next to the design team outside of tickets in JIRA. The times I have researched html/css code best practices for a design, I’ve been met with “that’s for the developers to do.”

I think that many of these articles about designers should code are premised on small teams developing consumer apps, starting fresh with modern architecture, not large-scale organizations where design has only recently been awkwardly grafted onto the IT department.

P.S. User experience IS part of a developer’s job: optimizing performance is a piece of a good user experience. Making time to sit in on usability tests to see how people interact with their code should be part of the job. Understanding why UX designers have proposed a solution should be part of the job. In fact, I believe that the user experience should be part of everyone’s job.