Ball-on-the-end-of-a-stick is a pretty common anime staff design, it just looks generic to me rather than a callout to anything specific.
Thinking about this some more, yeah, that's true. It's
especially true for amateurs as a base. For example, I, an amateur just drawing for fun, drew a witch a couple years ago just off the top of my head because one: I needed to draw something, and two: it's just to get a "good idea" of what this potential rough draft of a witch might look like for something I would like to do in the future.
And I don't mind showing her off to prove my point because she's just a rough draft, I am most likely changing her design
anyway (probably not her hair, though) and she's nameless for the time being.
Seriously, I came up with
all of that within an hour (probably thirty minutes in actuality) because I was
bored. I don't even remember what the fuck I was going with for her staff, like what her power even
is. Maybe it's mathematical in nature, I don't fucking know. She's just meant to be an assistant for the boss lady (you can kinda see her bleeding through).
So it would
not surprise me if that cat-girl and her staff didn't go through any drafts, they just went with the first character design someone (possibly Raye) shat out during their lunchbreak after watching
Tokyo Mew Mew and rolled with it. Like aren't
good character designs supposed to tell you at a
glance a story or what their personality is like? She looks like a one-off villain-of-the-week from Sailor Moon, but the villain of the arc was too lazy to come up with something meaningful in their design and just decided to transform Luna because reasons.