Speaking only for myself, taking copious notes in class always substantially hampered my ability to keep up. The only times I took such notes were in a couple of mathematics courses which moved at a blistering pace and had no textbook or other provided material: in those, it was essential to write everything down so that it could be studied and learned later, after class. But the act of writing during those classes made it quite a bit harder to follow the lectures while they were happening.
I would have much preferred to receive hand-outs with the same definitions/theorems on it a day or two before the lecture, so that I could have put my full attention on the professor and the material.
In basically all other courses, I only wrote notes when struck by particularly insightful thoughts I wanted to remember later, and my notes as often were about my own reactions as about what the professors were saying. But because I find it easy to focus and pay close attention in lectures, I generally had better recall afterward than most of my peers, even the ones who spent much more time “studying” their notes later.
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By contrast, I had several friends who could only follow lectures by writing notes while in class, because otherwise they found lectures hard to focus on, and because they found that the physical act of writing what they heard to enormously help their later recall (not to mention they had a physical artifact they could refer to afterward).
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I would like to see your sources for the statement “learning styles is more or less discredited”, as it does not align with my experience either as a student, as an observer of other students, or as the son of a school teacher. It seems completely obvious and non-controversial to me that some people have an easier time following verbal conversation than others, that some have an easier time reading/writing, that some people are more attuned to pictures/graphic elements, etc.
Maybe “learning styles” is a bad name for this, and I personally believe that it’s mostly the result of practice and acculturation rather than anything genetic/inherent, but it still remains obviously (to me) true that different students find different modalities and teaching/learning methods more effective.