I'm aware of various information management tools, but exploring these tools, getting familiar with specific syntax or intricacies of usage needs a higher activation energy than simply running $EDITOR and typing away.

I'm usually working on hardware that's at least a couple of years old, and the experience with modern day desktop applications (websites in an Electron-wrapper, if you will) is that they're terribly slow on relatively okay, albeit older, hardware. Not to mention (but I haven't checked!) that you'll need the application to search through your content, perhaps due to the use of some database, instead of grep(1)ing for keywords inside text files. I'm not opposed to optimized, application-specific search, but, for personal usage, if I need the application to search through content, this makes data portability much more difficult.