PM on Design Systems here at Figma.
There's an element of truth to this post, but I think the author's conclusions are incorrect.
First is the truth - we are working on things that allow designs to be closer to code (allow here is the key word, not enforce). We've always seen Figma as being at the center between Freeform and Structured design - I talked about it in depth during our keynote at Schema 3 years ago: https://youtu.be/Yo7rL0pvHTk?t=147
Our goal is to enable both, not push designers towards one or the other. The author notes:
> You can’t drag things around freely or try odd combinations of layouts. You can’t simply paste something into a frame without it snapping to the bottom of the stack.
What the author is seeing isn't Figma restricting your ability to design, it's other designers adopting it as part of their process. I'd encourage the author to dive into the why of that. What we've found is that often times these structured design approaches can accelerate even freeform design - rarely do you want a menu that doesn't have equal gaps between similar items, so quickly adding that logic can let you move faster. More importantly though, quickly moving past those repetitive parts of the design can let you more quickly focus on the more creative parts.
All that said, these structured approaches can be overbaked, which is what the author might be seeing. Knowing when not to use features such as autolayout can be just as important as knowing how to use them. The most important thing though is you can always detach from them. One of the top requests we've had from Design Systems authors for a while now is to prevent detaches, but it something we've never implemented, mainly because we always want a way to allow the designer to fully go back to that freeform design mentality. You can always remove an autolayout, you can always detach an instance, you can always break a variable. They're optional features, not handcuffs that bind you. If you want to go a step further, there are plenty of plugins out there that fully detach all restrictive elements on a selection, making all colors a hex code, all autolayouts removed, and everything absolutely positioned so you can just drag things around. We don't provide a native feature to do this (since it's a fairly extreme measure that removes a lot of helpful metadata), but we also don't prevent actions like this if people really want to go to the creative extremes.
Happy to answer any questions about any of this though - this is my bread and butter.