I use .md files. I've tried everything, your words feel like a question I once had. Reframe the problem; setup a system. Then commit. Incremental improvements will happen automatically. Do more with less.

I built my own topic maps-based knowledge management system, Contextualise, a tool to organise projects and activities made up of unstructured information resources (think notes, URLs, images, files, locations, events, whatever…). All appropriately linked. I’ve been using it for years and it works very well for me. It does, however, require consistency, discipline, and effort.

I use orgmode within emacs. Be careful that if you go down this rabbit hole, it can consume a lot of your time if you let it. I eventually stopped trying to optimize my productivity when I discovered it became another form of procrastination. I am OK with letting things go and not trying to be on top of all of the flood of information. These days I just iterate on my current system to help organize my life but not in a second brain way.

Whatever the tool is, I figured that eventually, pushing scripts and markdown files to GitHub is the best idea. It's a bit difficult with the work laptop but those are usually small enough to re-type.

Github repos and Workflowy

I don't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rote_learning

I practice learning how to learn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking

I write things down so that I can forget about them.

I use flatnotes[1] on my homeserver with a cronjob, that automatically adds, commits and pushes the whole data directory into a private git repository.

It's not perfect, but dead simple and at least I can search, edit everywhere and easily migrate, if I'd find something better.

1: https://github.com/Dullage/flatnotes