I think we conflate two types of note-taking:

  1. List-style notes of things we need to remember

  2. School-style notes of information and ideas

I think the former requires a tool, but nothing particularly sophisticated - Apple Notes for example with its search indexing is fine

I think the latter we write only to stimulate our brain to process information and learn better.

I think there is a discrepancy where a lot of tools attempt to make Type 2 notes more "convenient", i.e. to trying to somehow make them an extension of our brain, but the truth is that it's like hacking a hard drive to work as fast as a CPU register -- retrieving and working with information is always going to be orders of magnitude slower than working through your thoughts in your brain.