Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typographic documentation is for designers generally, but there is a world where this can actually help everyone. Designers should make consistent designs. By doing this Developers can create functional designs systems that have sane default behaviors. Once you can get to that point, the system serves to reduce the load from the dev, not increase. I have created a tailwind-based design system interpretation like this…
Good points which I generally agree with, but I still think it's common to see a remarkable level of time and effort spent on typography compared to even other parts of the frontend. Not always, but surprisingly often. Many companies have these style guides around typography. Beautiful, thoughtful, very well made things for sure, yet when some backend dev makes a typo so the custom font drops to arial or whatever, it…
In my opinion the "typography guys" don't have an especially stronger "voice" than anyone else. They just do a job once, get paid some (relatively small) amount for it, and then move on to the next project. At the biggest these projects involve a few people working for a year or two. Their entire job is about communication, sales, and sweating small design details, so it's no wonder they do a relatively good job at those.
The amount of work those "20 year old SQL schemas" take, once you include every bit of other comparable detail across a whole organization, is (at least) thousands of times bigger and more complicated. Overall the "code guys" have much more resources spent, spend a lot more time, and everyone ultimately cares a lot more about their output. They are large teams of either long-term employees or long-term contractors, whose work never really ends.
In short: Code is a sprawling mess rather than a cutely packaged self-contained thing. Unsurprisingly it's harder to make sense of at a glance.