I'm a designer. I built brainglue.ai without Figma, a design system, or a UI library. I just went directly to code (react+tailwind) and let a style organically emerge.
I'm not saying that I'm a unicorn and that my idea-to-code-to-design execution is flawless, but I certainly believe that in this situation, if I hadn't done it this way, I wouldn't have done it all. However, doing this would be wasteful or dumb in almost every other situation that requires my design output.
People pay for Figma precisely because it's a middle ground. It was a middle ground before, and it will continue to be unless something fundamental changes.
Small suggestion, I would preload the contents of each tab and the images in the circle after the main content is loaded. There was a good two second lag loading the images here in Australia.
I'm not saying that I'm a unicorn and that my idea-to-code-to-design execution is flawless, but I certainly believe that in this situation, if I hadn't done it this way, I wouldn't have done it all. However, doing this would be wasteful or dumb in almost every other situation that requires my design output.
People pay for Figma precisely because it's a middle ground. It was a middle ground before, and it will continue to be unless something fundamental changes.