Some context: I work as an interaction designer in an enterprise org, but I am the only UXer in my business unit (and my country, as it happens). I work with the company’s core UX team, but I'm not part of that team - I’m part of a specific product’s dev team.

Our core UX team maintain a component library, which I can (and do) use… but can’t edit - which is fair.  Unfortunately, the product I work on is an outlier and has a lot of unique needs.  I also maintain my own component library for things which are completely unique to this product… that all works well.

What doesn’t work so well is when I need a custom variant of a component from the core team’s library.  I don’t need (or want) a whole new component, or the maintenance overhead of maintaining a local branch of their entire component library (if I even can without having write-access to it) - I just need to be able to add (for example) a single new variant to a library component which I can use locally without having to detach things and lose the library connections.

Being able to create local variants to extend a library component would simplify so much of my workflow.