I have no experience with big projects and infrastructure but I believe that having a design system from the beginning can avoid a lot of headache in the future. I personally always make a "mini design system" for my personal projects. Besides, it's kinda cool to make design systems.
I'm aligned with your comment. I feel like it saved us a lot of time, even creating a product from scratch & before PMF. We started with a simple one, without over-engineering the DS
Have you seen good resources / examples to build a 'mini design system'?
Looks like most of the content about this is made for larger design teams (>20 designers)
Not really... When I'm making a "mini design system", I just create a Figma file with the colors, gradients, shadows, components and typography. I think this is enough to use in a smaller project and you don't have to make it fancy or anything. Just put things there in a way a normal person can understand and that's it.
My suggestion is: don't overthink it. If it's not a big project (yet), you can just use your intuition sometimes.
