We didn't have an automated pipeline since the UX team wasn't really tech savvy enough to dive into detailed styles, so we relied on recurring syncs every 2 weeks. The DS changes tended to be slow and incremental from the UX side as well which helped.

Bootstrap (like Tailwind and others) has a configuration for generating the full component class and styles from a few variables, so updates to fonts, colors, spacing, etc were easy to manage and roll out to wide usage incrementally.