The digital airport comparison is such a great way of wrapping my mind around the concept of high valuations for digital commerce - it's business without the usual B&M overhead.
Block navigation is definitely clumsy (maddeningly so), but I haven't had any issues with it being slow. Are you working with a lot of data on a single page?
I've used Workflowy since its inception (2010), but recently switched over to Notion. For my use case, it's worked perfectly and I haven't looked back.
There has to be a better approach than to just settle on one of the two extremes: what architecture styles have a mix of moderate ornamentation, but with straightforward and utility-driven design?
I tried looking for environmental impact studies for Microsoft's data center project, but all I could find were object tracking models that their team built for tracking marine life.
If a published study on this exists, I'd love to take a look.