I agree. There’s a lot of hidden costs when adopting shared design libraries that many articles fail to publish. As you mention, overhead maintenance costs are introduced which in addition introduces process and an increased need for effective communication.

We also found ourselves using a tool similar to Abstract in order to control updates to our system. We initially trialled Invision Craft which worked to some degree but yet again the admin costs were quite large.

I think the issue may not be with the size of the company i.e. small startup / large organisation but the team size in which the library is used.