Unbundling Tools for Thought is an essay by Fernando Borretti I found via Gwern's comment which immediately resonated with me (emphasis mine): 

I’ve written something like six or seven personal wikis over the past decade. It’s actually an incredibly advanced form of procrastination¹. At this point I’ve tried every possible design choice. 

1. Lifecycle: I’ve built a few compiler-style wikis: plain-text files in a git repo statically compiled to HTML. I’ve built a couple using live servers with server-side rendering. The latest one is an API server with a React frontend.

2. Storage: I started with plain text files in a git repo, then moved to an SQLite database with a simple schema. The latest version is an avant-garde object-oriented hypermedia database with bidirectional links implemented on top of SQLite.

3. Markup: I used Markdown here and there. Then I built my own TeX-inspired markup language. Then I tried XML, with mixed results. The latest version uses a WYSIWYG editor made with ProseMirror.

And yet I don’t use them. Why? Building them was fun, sure, but there must be utility to a personal database.

At first I thought the problem was friction: the higher the activation energy to using a tool, the less likely you are to use it. Even a small amount of friction can cause me to go, oh, who cares, can’t be bothered. So each version gets progressively more frictionless². The latest version uses a WYSIWYG editor built on top of ProseMirror (it took a great deal for me to actually give in to WYSIWYG). It also has a link to the daily note page, to make journalling easier. The only friction is in clicking the bookmark to localhost:5000. It is literally two clicks to get to the daily note.

And yet I still don’t use it. Why? I’m a great deal more organized now than I was a few years ago. My filesystem is beautifully structured and everything is where it should be. I could fill out the contents of a personal wiki.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no point: because everything I can do with a personal wiki I can do better with a specialized app, and the few remaining use cases are useless. Let’s break it down.

I've tried three different times to create a personal wiki, using the last one for a solid year and a half before finally giving up and just defaulting to a janky combination of Notion and Google Docs/Sheets, seduced by sites like Cosma Shalizi's and Gwern's long content philosophy (emphasis mine): 

... I have read blogs for many years and most blog posts are the triumph of the hare over the tortoise. They are meant to be read by a few people on a weekday in 2004 and never again, and are quickly abandoned—and perhaps as Assange says, not a moment too soon. (But isn’t that sad? Isn’t it a terrible ROI for one’s time?) On the other hand, the best blogs always seem to be building something: they are rough drafts—works in progress^15. So I did not wish to write a blog. Then what? More than just “evergreen content”, what would constitute Long Content as opposed to the existing culture of Short Content? How does one live in a Long Now sort of way?^16⁠

My answer is that one uses such a framework to work on projects that are too big to work on normally or too tedious. (Conscientiousness is often lacking online or in volunteer communities¹⁸ and many useful things go undone.) Knowing your site will survive for decades to come gives you the mental wherewithal to tackle long-term tasks like gathering information for years, and such persistence can be useful1^9—if one holds onto every glimmer of genius for years, then even the dullest person may look a bit like a genius himself20^{. (}Even experienced professionals can only write at their peak for a few hours a day—usually first thing in the morning, it seems.) Half the challenge of fighting procrastination is the pain of starting⁠—I find when I actually get ⁠into the swing⁠ of working on even dull tasks, it’s not so bad. So this suggests a solution: never start. Merely have perpetual drafts, which one tweaks from time to time. And the rest takes care of itself.

Fernando unbundles the use cases of a tool for thought in his essay; I'll just quote the part that resonated with me: 

The following use cases are very naturally separable: ...

• Learning: if you’re studying something, you can keep your notes in a TfT. This is one of the biggest use cases. But the problem is never note-taking, but reviewing notes. Over the years I’ve found that long-form lecture notes are all but useless, not just because you have to remember to review them on a schedule, but because spaced repetition can subsume every single lecture note. It takes practice and discipline to write good spaced repetition flashcards, but once you do, the long-form prose notes are themselves redundant.

(Tangentially, an interesting example of how comprehensively subsuming spaced repetition is is Michael Nielsen's Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics, in which he describes how he used "deep Ankification" to better understand the theorem that a complex normal matrix is always diagonalizable by a unitary matrix, as an illustration of a heuristic one could use to deepen one's understanding of a piece of mathematics in an open-ended way, inspired by Andrey Kolmogorov's essay on, of all things, the equals sign. I wish I read that while I was still studying physics in school.)

Fernando, emphasis mine:

So I often wonder: what do other people use their personal knowledge bases for? And I look up blog and forum posts where Obsidian and Roam power users explain their setup. And most of what I see is junk. It’s never the Zettelkasten of the next Vannevar Bush, it’s always a setup with tens of plugins, a daily note three pages long that is subdivided into fifty subpages recording all the inane minutiae of life. This is a recipe for burnout.

People have this aspirational idea of building a vast, oppressively colossal, deeply interlinked knowledge graph to the point that it almost mirrors every discrete concept and memory in their brain. And I get the appeal of maximalism. But they’re counting on the wrong side of the ledger. Every node in your knowledge graph is a debt. Every link doubly so. The more you have, the more in the red you are. Every node that has utility—an interesting excerpt from a book, a pithy quote, a poem, a fiction fragment, a few sentences that are the seed of a future essay, a list of links that are the launching-off point of a project—is drowned in an ocean of banality. Most of our thoughts appear and pass away instantly, for good reason.