The counter intuitive thing is that these apps are thought of as something that helps with attention disorders. But wanting to "organize life", "track thoughts and ideas", "never forget what you learned", etc, are symptoms, not cures.
It's not a symptom of ADHD. It's one of the coping strategies for people with ADHD who have problems memorising things.
The usual way to track knowledge and tasks is within a project. You come to a road block, do research, overcome, and continue.
But many of those note taking posts talk about personal "wiki" projects and tracking _everything_. I suspect that with ADHD its hard to filter out the important things from background. And based on my observation wth these apps people start organizing and remembering this "background". When background noise is reduced the need for complex apps is no longer there - there are a lot fewer things left that are worth remembering. (exceptions apply, of course)
That might be your personal experience/bias speaking.
For many creative endeavours there's not a "single project" where you do research, finish, wrap up and that's it. You need to track lots of pieces of information across many projects, domains, and across time.
You're kind of implying that failing memory is unusual/exceptional and that it needs particular attention.
Here's the cold hard truth of memory: your memory isn't as good as you think it is. No one's memory is as good as they think it is. And nothing you remember comes back out of your memory quite the way it went in.
Writing good, complete notes that could be read by someone else (complete sentences) helps you design the prompts for your future recall of something complicated. Because one day you'll be that someone else.
When I write code, I try to write code and comments that a version of me that is ten years older and persistently two hours short of sleep will be able to cope with at 10pm. My tireder, older self. Because one day he'll have to read it, understand it, and change it.
I try to write notes the same way!
There's really only one thing you gotta know about note-taking: you either optimize for fast writing or for fast information retrieval. Since I rarely read my notes, I optimize for fast dumping them.
All apps and organizational schemes like Zettelkasten try to optimize the information retrieval aspect, which imho, is probably not that important for many people.
Why do you feel the need to "structure thoughts" and "get it out of your system"?
Asking as a way to point out that feeling the need to do it is not a forgone conclusion.
Well, because the alternative is for your thoughts to be unstructured. Lots of people live their lives that way: reminiscing about that time they got so drunk or really told that guy off, repeating funny lines they heard on some TV series, rehearsing ethnic or religious stereotypes, complaining about the neighbors' loud music, trying to get laid, and heating up some hamburgers at dinnertime. Lots of people are content to be consumers and to repeat what they've heard. Then they die.
But it doesn't have to be that way. You can structure your thoughts. You can be a creator, not just a consumer, and to a significant extent you can direct your life to a goal rather than simply floating at random. Notetaking is helpful for doing that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30098854
I give you a simple example. If you play Wordle and you stop to think about your next guess, you can make all the possible permutations in your brain. This is possible with the downside that you might start to think in loops and consider the same word-pattern over and over again.
Or you write them down and solve the next guess by doing all permutations on paper (or a text editor).
Note-taking is somewhat similar. Structuring thoughts for me means that I write them down to avoid looping around the same thing all the time. I get it out of my system, because my brain isn't stuck in the same loop. Note-taking helps to speed up the passive brain processing task in some cases. Not always. Not for everything.
Unless one has extraordinary mnemonic capabilities, note taking is a way to structure and store concepts.
Even if this wasn't the case, personal notes are still a more efficient/effective way than googling, for two reasons: 1. on the notes, one puts the processed version of a concept, so that it's safer/more stable/improved/cleaner/adapted etc. 2. personal notes follow the mind of who writes them, so the concepts are faster to find.
It's the inverse.
Note-taking might be a symptom of OCD or autism disorders (that can make people compulsively take notes or enjoying collecting information in itself), but they are cures (or, rather, coping strategies) for ADHD.
ADHD is not manifested as "tendency to take notes" for note-taking to be a symptom.
It's manifested as tendency to be disorganized, to have trouble tracking thoughts, forgetting, etc - which makes note-taking a way to manage symptoms.
It's looks like you fell for the "correlation equals causation" fallacy, not in a study, but in a simple real life observation that should have been trivial to see the right casual direction!
My day can be ruined by positive and negative ruminations. Writing stuff down really helps me let go of them.
1) a symptom of being a freelancer with multiple clients who revisits projects sometimes a decade after doing them. It is the only way to proceed -- even if you were to assert that persistent "documentation" of a project is distinct from "notes" about it, those notes are still essential.
2) a route towards making that documentation; it's easier to assemble documentation from things you've noted than to start with a blank page.
3) a way to know, deeply, what it is I actually think about something. Not just what I think right now in that moment, but why. What facts I took into account; what facts I disregarded, why I disregarded them, and why I might need to revisit that next time.
I also need to take notes to raise the important things above the useless things that I remember.
If I really care about the meetings I attended being useful (not often), I will take notes on what is discussed and decided.
Now that my brain operates more closely to my neurotypical peers, I've found myself not needing to take constant notes and review my day in order to remember things.