Often in early stage features, the owner of the Design System may feel hesitant about adding a new component when it’s only instance is on a single page. The Engineer/Designer may make the call to keep the design pattern local, but still loop/re-use the design pattern. At the moment this can be achieved by keeping the Figma component local and repeating it, or not turn it into a component, repeat it, and deal with the time-consuming changes.
Hey there @Rhys5
As you mentioned, one solution is to create a local component only to test a new “list item” and duplicate its instance. But it might be cool if we had a way to make a design pattern, just like components.
This is also achievable with “placeholder components”. it’s not a tool, but an approach. you create a component containing some smaller “placeholder component”, that can be replaced by other components. a “placeholder component” is like an empty frame with some unnatrual border color. just to make it noticable that it’s only a placeholder, not a real component for design system. and with the “instance property” you can easily swap it with the desired component.
For repetitive things like list-items, you can also check this post:
Vote for that one if you believe it is the same as your idea. That one has more votes.