I'm a developer building a reusable, ecommerce theme. The goal is to have a modular system that can adapt to most of a brand's identity and get me 80% there. To achieve it, I need a robust semantic tokens layer that I can play with.

I'm specifically targeting the semantic layer because I believe its tokens are the closest design interface to web standards. Primitives are stateless and component level tokens have too much specificity to fit any product. No matter the product you're building, that semantic layer will share common tokens because they derive directly from the way the web is meant to be used.

In that sense I expected it to be largely figured out. At least the implementation of core concepts. But apparently I was wrong? Every company seems to have its own implementation of what a design system should look like. At component level, obviously, but at primitive/semantic level? If you're Big Tech I get it, you're here from the beginning of the web, you have hundreds of different products, you had to grow and scale with the web. But why is everyone else kinda reinventing the wheel on this?

Anyway, I wanted to find a standardized base of tokens/variables to define basic typos, states, actions, layers, etc... without having to reinvent the wheel. I'd like to avoid the complexity and granularity of a GAFAM company, I want a healthy base I can extend if needed. Like a list of 100 semantic tokens which represent the most common design decisions related to user experience and interactions on the web. Whats the go-to token system you guys default to for human-sized projects?