When working on products that can last decades, you can't just throw away all styling and start from scratch. In this case, design tokens are essentially styling hooks that allow teams to propagate design changes at scale without rebuilding everything.
> styling hooks
You mean variables.
I don't get why the marketing speak is necessary. I also think it's detrimental to what we've built as engineers. Please stop. It's neither a token nor a hook, it's a simple variable.
You may not be aware (and 10 years late in trying to stop this), but this name has been very well received in the web design industry and frontend world and helps us build a community of craft to solve similar problems together.. so it looks like it's here to stay.