After spending a little more than a decade, and had worked with vast variety products and projects, personally, I think atomic design be a prefect fit for scalable / long-term development.
To avoid wast your time, I would to address that atomic design implementation could be a overkill for known short term projects (less than 6 months), as I mentioned before frameworks like bootstrap and foundation would do just fine
Great, you are still reading.
In short, the implementation is a sorting process: Sorting components based on its atomic category.