There's a phrase going around now, design ops, and under the jargon it names something I'd felt for a while without a word for it.
The thought is plain. What a designer makes isn't only their taste. It's their taste and everything sitting around it, the files, the naming, the handoff, the review cycles, the ten small frictions that quietly eat a fifth of the week and that nobody counts because they're dull.
I've seen good designers turn out flat work because the mess around them never let them think, and I've seen steadier ones do their best work simply because everything nearby was out of the way and their good hours were their own.
So I've grown a little careful about the parts that don't show. Naming that still makes sense a year later. Components reused instead of rebuilt. One agreed place where the current version lives. Templates for the parts that are the same every time, so the parts that are different get the attention.
The principle underneath is one I keep coming back to. What you automate is a statement about what you value. Every hour you take back from the dull work goes somewhere, and where it goes is rather the whole point.
Design ops isn't bureaucracy. It's the quiet infrastructure that decides how much of the week gets spent on the work you came to do.