I keep thinking about Henrik Karlsson’s great (paywalled) essay on writing in a way that improves your thinking. He says his essays are good because he doesn’t write them in one go, but returns to them over and over essentially having a dialogue with different versions of himself. This means that his essays are not written by one Henrik, but by ten Henriks, which makes the essays more interesting and insightful. He also says that your note taking system is not important — be it Zettelkasten or something else — what matters is to “arrange the writing in such a way that you repeatedly return to ideas”.
I think this focus on communication is important and should be your north star when note taking. Niklas Luhmann also considered his Zettlekasten a “communication partner” and wanted his notes to surprise him continuously, which is what he considered to be the point of communication: mutual surprise.
This is the reason why, after trying Bear and Obsidian, I keep returning to Roam Research for note taking. It’s a tool where it’s the easiest to have “sprawling dialogues with myself”. Nothing has made note taking as fun as Roam. Since trying bullet point transclusion in Roam, I miss it in any other note taking app.
I think a lot of people, myself included, get bogged down with choosing the right note taking strategy, the right note taking app, the right set of unnecessary plugins. The choice with all of it should be simple: choose the one that enables having the most conversation with yourself.