I'd agree with you, but the killer feature digital notes have, for me, is the quick and effortless searching.
For tasks, this might be the plan for the next few days, where everything fits on the same page.
For notes, those might be scribbles to help solve the problem at hand.
Larger and more long term things start benefitting from searchability indeed.
I couldn’t ever find a nice way of exporting (and backing up) my Notes notes. There was an IMAP storage option but that meant losing formatting options.
A few things I miss for this to be really good are:
1. Folding. A single file will be long. Being able to fold the major sections (# Work, # Private # Projects) would be really helpful. It seems Bear is planning to add folding.
2. Security. One can select all notes under a given tag (for example #Diary), but if they contain an attachment - for example an image, the password based encryption can't be applied.
Did you look at FSNotes before switching to Bear yorself?
My own note taking is too fragmented right now, being split between org mode, FSNotes, and Apple Notes. It’s a bit like having clothing with too many pockets: I am too often unsure where to look for a particular note.
I've done some minor OCR to scan my bank PDF statements. I use tesseract iirc, there are different training sets to use. You can build a training set from your own writing.
I really wish a modern Newton existed. Evernote started off quite Newton'y (Newton team members were on board) but I fell off quite early.