I believe there's a sweet spot between note-taking as a procrastination cope and adding actual value. As in, storing important insights that might trigger more insights in a different context(future).

The value of note-taking is undeniable, it's like a new "layer" after the neocortex where your memories are not exponentially decaying by the lack of usage. So utilization is not the sole factor for recall.

If done well note-taking be be considered "externalized cognition" where you instead of holding everything in your brain and treat as a storage + compute. You just compute. Anything important will be there in your notes. This allows you to have more "mental energy" to actually draw connections between things instead of struggling to remember them. It's like the beta version of neura-link or other intelligence-augmenting technologies.

I'm working on such a thing right now [1] It's like roam(outliner) but also have a HTML(plain text, stable) Engine for you to build more things inside of it.

[1] https://github.com/ilse-langnar/notebook