Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless you're building content-marketing or similar- you don't need a lot of the exploratory phase to be done freeform. Trying to implement designs in a product where every single new design stretches or modifies the design system is mind bogglingly annoying as a developer, especially if you've got a small team trying to crank out new features. We don't need a tenth variation of a call to action, we don't need to use…
Exploratory design isn't for crafting padding overwrites and call to action tweaks... It's for thinking from first principles about the problems users face, and how to shape the products we create to best help those users overcome their problems. This means reconsidering faulty assumptions about the nature of the problem users face & the shape of the product that best solves that problem. I hate this shift of the rol…
When you do, you end up with prototypes that are disconnected from what exists, and don't look good when you actually start using the existing visual design system. That's where all the one-off tweaks start coming in.
Unless the business is willing to pay for research into a holistic change to the semantics of the existing design system, Figma is perfectly suitable for the majority of design work once a cohesive design language has been put together.