“Put another way: what kind of decisions does your technical stack make about who’s allowed to contribute to the front-end? And how expensive will it be to alter those decisions, and introduce a different way of working? For many organizations, the technical barriers to cross-functional collaboration can be unacceptably high. And what’s more, the cost of that complexity is rarely acknowledged.”
I think about this a lot. I recently worked on a project where the designer had our code base up and running locally and felt comfortable and preferred to do a lot of the smaller customizations of the design himself. It was amazing, we both worked to our strengths, but it's also a rarity. Our code base is difficult to run locally and not something many non engineers want to dive into (even I dislike it, to be honest). But it changed the entire tenor of the project to be able to collaborate in that way.