Many web designers wish design software behaved more like the web to reduce translation between mockups and production. Current tools force conversion, harming time and quality. Attempts to bridge the gap vary widely and none have prevailed. Tools that faithfully model web features face complexity and limited adoption. Popular web-based tools like Figma render on a canvas, not as real HTML elements, so designs are abstractions rather than true web constructs. Replicating web behavior in design tools encounters challenges such as representing interactive states (hover, active, focus) and global states like light/dark mode, complicating accurate visual design.
At some point, I think all web designers circle around to the thought that if design software was only more like the web itself that it would be better for it. We would gain efficiency in that there may not need be much translation at all between design and the finished product. Time and quality suffer during the translation required now.
Tools that replicate the features of the web faithfully have trouble with complexity and finding an audience that wants that. Even the prevailing web design tool today, Figma, runs on the web but the designs you create there are not really of the web. You're drawing rectangles on a <canvas> there, not crafting <div>s. And while some of those abstractions in Figma are designed to replicate web features, they are that: a replication, not reality.
Most sites have a style for links and buttons, and design software has no problem accommodating that. But those styles change in different states. What happens when you hover them? Click them? Tab to focus them? Those can (and should) have different designs, but static design software doesn't always accommodate that very well, leaving you to invent your own system for how to represent it.
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