Are Digital Notes a Fad that is Bad?

I've been circling the note-taking and learning space for 10 years at least, trynig to find the "right" system for me. I started with notebooks for reading notes going with the idea that if the thought/quote felt like too much work to write down by hand, it didn't have value. I used Bullet Journal for a long time because it has the same core idea, if a task or project is too "hard" to move you've already voted on it's value.

Then as I read books like Building a Second Brain I realize that almost all of the people he cites as paragons of creation used an analogue system. They put stuff in boxes to reference for creative work. They carried a notebook and wrote notes down.

They did not use some digital tool like Evernote to organize all this stuff. They wanted to have physical reminders of the things that they were thinking about.

Then I read The Marks are on the Knowledge Worker, which heavily discusses the environments that a knowledge worker seems to thrive in. It's messy, maybe quite messy, but they can put their hands on their notes and research items. These thinkers take up physical space with their notes. They may literally live inside these notes as they walk into their office with the piles of reference material around.

We also have Scott out there talking about antinet, physical notes on notecards. I can't deny the appeal of having cards to actually look at and move around during a writing project.

These ideas have at least led me to ponder the idea that all these digital tools may be a fad that is mostly productivity porn. It makes people feel like they're doing something, but they're really contributing to digital clutter that doesn't result in any output.

We don't look to the people of the past that had vast note systems, but did nothing with them. We look at people who produced work that has made their names live on.