Very nice story - I like it! Fully agree with your point of view and I am a practitioner of the paper notebook + pencil/pen approach.
My professional work is business consulting with a heavy emphasis on technology solutions. I'm surrounded by tech options:- Notion, Jira, Evernote and more. Great software tools, but none quite enable active listening and learning the way active manual documentation provides. It is not the content I jot down today. It is the in between time of reviewing - drawing lines between pages or topics (Yes, I draw lines.); capturing a passing thought; pasting a clipping - that infomation synthesis occurs. Shoved in between is my TTD (Things to Do) List .
Now - when I find a topic area to dig deeper, create a digital notebook using Apple Notes. Here I paste URLs, docs, etc... This becomes my library - an extension of the papernote book.
A side comment: my dad was a research biochemist. I have some of this lab notebooks from college (1940s) thru his prof career. They don't look much different than your pics - aside from some of the graphics are hand drawn plots! Penmanship was a lot better then too. I could never write that clearly using liquid ink fountain pens.
