The post is short so I don’t want to read too much into the authors intentions, but it seems like their logic may be suffering from a blind spot - that patterns and systems that look like unnecessary complexity from the outside might actually be in service of simplifying the use of those notes for the writer.

You can’t just look at a system you don’t understand and deem it too complicated. You’d need some objective measure of how efficient and effective a note taking system is at doing its job - e.g., the speed a user can later find a particular note, or the success rate the user might have at querying their database of notes and getting back a quality answer.