I've come to the same conclusion. It's just easier, especially for things that involve diagrams. $10 worth of notebooks and pens is a much better value than something that is more fragile, has to be charged, etc and orders of magnitude more expensive.

Also, I tend to only write things down as a note-taking and memorization exercise, or to think out a certain idea. I usually don't have to read the notes again. So the archiving functionality of having digital paper-like notes is not nessisarially more useful, and it is often more difficult to search through than physical notebooks. Anything I really need to read later, I can write succinctly in a text file or something.

I also don't like getting locked into a certain ecosystem. Xournal++ is the only open-source cross-platform app I can find, and it's not that good.

Even for reading physical books, you can find a lot of used paperbacks for less than $10, which is very little when you consider the value of the time you spend reading them, the ease of flipping through pages and being able to dog-ear them, and the collectible aspect of the book covers covers. An eink tablet be nice for reading textbooks and papers that are more expensive and require pirating, however. But for now I just use a regular screen in portrait.

> I usually don't have to read the notes again.

Yeah.

For several kinds of notes, the value from writing is in doing the writing to assist thinking. Once I write it down, it doesn't need to hang around in my head.