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The Problem
A design token system starts clean. Colors, spacing, type scale all values, all legitimate. Then someone needs a quick way to track whether a modal is open, and a custom property is right there, syntactically identical to every token around it. It gets used. Nobody stops to ask whether it should have been.
A stylesheet starts as presentation-only. Then a selector shows up that only applies if the user is logged in a decision CSS has no business making, encoded into CSS anyway, because in the moment it was the path of least resistance.
Neither choice looks wrong when it's made. The pattern across both is the same: nothing in the system had grounds to say no.
