Two years ago our team of eight maintained four internal tools, each with its own hand-rolled UI. Small changes rippled into weekend-long merges, and no two screens looked alike.
The turning point was realizing that consistency is not a design goal. It is an engineering strategy.
Moving to a shared component library cut our UI code by more than half. New screens now start from working building blocks, reviews focus on behavior instead of pixel details, and onboarding a developer takes days instead of months.