cva or plain props for 60 shared components, 5 devs and nobody who owns design Components

cva earns its keep precisely when variants combine - size times tone times state - and you are tired of a ternary that has to know about all three. That is real and your four-deep template literal is the symptom.

Out of 60 components, maybe 12 will actually have combinatorial variants. Do those. Leave a Divider as a div with props. Reaching for one API for all 60 is how you end up with a variant config for components that have exactly one appearance.

The failure mode at 5 people with no design owner is not the API though. It is that everyone adds a variant and nobody ever deletes one, so in a year Button has 9 tones, 4 of which appear once. Put variant names in code review explicitly. It is a social fix for a social problem.

Plain props, and stop there until it genuinely hurts. Every abstraction is a thing a new person has to learn before they can change a button, and at five people that cost is proportionally much higher than it looks. Unreadable ternaries can also be fixed by writing them less cleverly.

The question under the question is whether you have tokens. Without them, cva just relocates the hardcoded values into a tidier file, and you will still have four greys and three border radii that are almost the same.

cva is dead weight. Tailwind has data-[state=open]: variants natively, so drive everything off data attributes and delete the whole layer.

Whichever you pick, write down the decision and the reason in the repo, even three sentences. In eight months a new person will ask why, and the honest answer will otherwise be that someone had a preference on a Tuesday.