There are many things that make sense in one scenario and fail terribly in another. And it’s not a pattern to only exist in design or UX.
As a child, we might have had a parent screaming at us every now and then, and to escape these situations, we just sat in silence to avoid fuelling the rage. Later in life, in other, perhaps calmer discussions, we still can’t speak a word—although our views might be highly welcomed—because we still carry the fear of our younger self inside us.
These behaviours were once useful, but are now obsolete and require an update.
We can apply this same thinking to problems design people are confronted with.
There are libraries out there, being sold in the belief that it will help build faster. To have a preset of components to use. And we have once build one ourselves at Studio Lenzing—without using it ever again.
My point here being: a profound awareness of the context you’re operating in is crucial to understand specific needs and realise, that there is no one size fits all.