DX for Plugin Development is terrible.

I genuinely don’t understand how Figma continues to dominate given how hostile the experience has become — for both users and developers.

The UX is chaotic and non-intuitive: layers buried under layers, controls hidden behind inconsistent interaction models, and navigation that feels designed to fight the user instead of helping them. For many people — especially neurodivergent users — the interface can feel actively exclusionary rather than empowering. It’s hard to shake the feeling that usability is no longer the priority.

From a developer perspective, the situation is even worse. The platform is effectively closed. The MCP integration with Claude is read-only, and meaningful mutation requires plugins running inside Figma’s sandbox. There is no serious external API for programmatic design updates.

That makes modern workflows — automation, CI-style pipelines, integration with engineering systems — far more difficult than they should be.

Meanwhile nearly every capability surface seems designed to maximize monetization rather than ecosystem health. The result is a platform that behaves less like infrastructure for design systems and more like a gated environment teams are forced to work around.

History is full of companies that confused market position with permission to squeeze their users and developers. It usually ends the same way: the ecosystem eventually moves on.

Figma still has massive mindshare, but the direction feels increasingly hostile to the very community that made it successful.