The timeline for variables developed during the Adobe period.
It was in the works. But when Adobe became a player to acquire Figma, there was a mass scramble to wrap up any work in the pipeline. If you remember the “config” conference that year, it was a flood of things that were not yet done cooking.
Then Adobe fell through.
Then Figma never finished the uncooked stuff.
This is entirely a management issue. Product owners and leadership following a poor “Agile” mentality of “just ship something and get it to market.” Part of it was to add value to the product to pad the sale to Adobe. The other part was to get it out of the pipeline.
While I would also agree that all three of your assessments are also correct, Figma leadership has abandoned the idea of making a tool for designers. It is about saying “we do variables” now. Then that is all they needed to check the box.
All of the basic things that you would find in any software, re-order, naming- search(???) are left out and ignored. Not a priority.
