Pattern lab is a tool for creating front end design systems that can be implemented in other systems. Many Drupal agencies are using it in their workflow to allow their designers and front end devs to design and build without worrying about Drupal's contraint's. A drupal dev will later have to use the pattern lab templates in the site's theme, and pass in the necessary variables from twig.
Which version of pattern lab should I use?
When searching around for "drupal pattern lab", you'll soon run into this github page, a collection of projects and info about Drupal and Pattern Lab: https://drupal-pattern-lab.github.io/
This one has worked best for me:
https://github.com/pattern-lab/edition-php-drupal-standard
Plugins
https://github.com/EvanLovely/plugin-twig-namespaces
https://github.com/aleksip/plugin-data-transform *
https://github.com/pattern-lab/plugin-drupal-twig-components *
* Included by patternlab/edition-php-drupal-standard
This one promises to use Drupal's twig extensions within Pattern Lab.
https://github.com/drupal-pattern-lab/unified-twig-extensions
Drupal twig functions
When you compile Pattern lab, it needs access to the twig functions and filters used in them. If these are only in Drupal, they will need to be set up for Pattern Lab. You can find them in patterns/_twig-components/filters and functions. The pattern-lab/plugin-drupal-twig-components plugin should provide what you need, but get familiar with the files in here in case you hit an error that some function is missing. I've had to write some dummy functions that just return a string value to use in Pattern Lab, while in Drupal it will be populated with the real thing.