I do want to keep Notion's ability to work in a browser and to maintain a single, accessible store of my notes.
What are my options?
FWIW I use obsidian for "note-taking, list-making, and markdown friendly" and have not bothered with note graphs etc and it none of such features have gone on my way ever.
The good thing imo about obsidian is that it is perfectly possible to keep it all dead simple if that is what you want. The only "advanced" feature I use is rendering a slides-based presentation out of a markdown file (and setting up a css file for this). For any other notetaking or knowledge management tool I have spent more time configuring/learning to use it than actually taking notes.
For my uses, notion is unnecessarily complicated.
OK, I think this may be a bit less powerful than Notion and Obsidian.
The most important thing in any note taking app is to use it consistently and use it for years. And bring it with you as you change jobs.
Sometimes simple things that work in plain text files that can be exported and imported easily is what you need for long term note taking.
I feel like you just described Obsidian. You can do more with tagging and linking but you definitely don't have to
My biggest gripe is that the OSS project is very oriented around a hosted product rather than the self hosted - so things like AI configuration is tricky at best and ive had to manually manipulate my account in the db to remove "free" user limitations.
You can disable the graph feature and never link any notes.
The only downside for me is the inability to use it from a web browser. This isn't a major issue for my workflows.