Why should this conversation be separate from other conversations about the work to be done? Design is one consideration alongside frontend and backend considerations, which often all intersect and require the same participants. Shifting this discussion to a separate work item can result in disjointed conversations and difficulty finding where a decision was made.

You can see how the constant jumping between these two tools in the first scenario is super annoying, and also very risky as none of the changes you make in Figma are also automatically being updated in the same GitLab designs.

Personally I think we could get a ton more benefits and would also be able to pull new users into our platform by finding better ways to integrate/link/connect/display Figma in our work item objects. Today the biggest downside for "Design management" is that it's basically just a copy of what's happening inside of Figma that has to be manually kept in sync and requires users to constantly switch back and forth:

Every new variation to the view requires updating both the view model and the template. This holds true even for simple variations.