A design system that lives in a design tool is a style guide. A design system that lives in your build pipeline is infrastructure.
Most enterprise design systems fail quietly. Not because the components are wrong, but because nothing prevents a team from ignoring them. The library exists; the enforcement does not.
Treating a design system as infrastructure changes the questions you ask. What is the version policy? How are breaking changes communicated? What is the deprecation window? Who is on call when a token change ships a regression to twelve markets?
The systems that hold up have a release cadence, a changelog, automated visual regression testing, and a named maintainer with time allocated to the work. They publish tokens as a package that both design and code consume from the same source.
The commercial argument is straightforward. Every campaign page built from governed components is a page that does not need an accessibility audit, a performance review or a brand sign-off. That compounding saving, not visual consistency, is what justifies the investment to a CFO.