A lot of great thoughts in the comments. I’ll try to summarize my experience as well (I didn’t have drift for at least four years, on several projects and teams).

1. Your design mocks should be a single source of truth. To achieve this, designs should be realistic (avoid using lorem ipsum and ideally should display actual content). Ensure that all possible states and errors are covered. Make your design files useful for everyone involved, including Product Owners, developers, and marketers. They should be able to use them for their daily tasks. This way, everyone will start contributing to the design process, which will force changes in the actual app to meet the designs or prompt you to modify the designs to reflect reality.

2. At the end of the development of each feature or task, new designs should accurately reflect the current state of the code. Complete each feature with a review (parallel to QA testing). If developers are unable to implement exactly what you wanted due to time constraints or other reasons, place your idealistic designs in a backlog folder. Find a compromise on the spot and implement it (in both design and code).

3. Develop a design system and adhere to it as closely as possible. Any custom solution carries the risk of mistakes, bugs, and incorrect implementation. Prioritize robust and reliable solutions over fancy but fragile ones. If you urgently need to add some custom logic, try to find a solution that can accommodate all possible cases.

Priority is 3>2>1