Posture
What the system deliberately refuses to be. Unlike the principles, these are stances rather than gates.
A fixed look
The brand is the one thing you can replace: set the four --color-brand* variables after the stylesheet import. The radius ladder, the type ramp and every other custom property are fixed, and reassigning them may break in any release. There is no runtime theme prop and no provider. Light and dark are the only modes.
Public, not open source
The package is public on npm, but its licence is proprietary: publishing it grants no right to use, copy or redistribute it. It is built for one house style, not as a general-purpose library to reshape.
You build on top, not against
The supported levers are className on primitives (still held to the token language), render composition, and the compositions layer where domain assemblies live. ProductCard is one such assembly: it composes 13 lower units into one domain control without touching a token.
Stylesheet size
The JavaScript tree-shakes: importing Button bundles only Button. The CSS doesn't. Tailwind scans the package's files, not your import graph, so your build emits the whole utility vocabulary however few components you use. It dedupes to tens of kilobytes and caches after first load. There is no lighter stylesheet.