There will come a day when my hammer metaphor is bent so far that it breaks, but today is not that day.
Does a hammer make someone stronger?
No.
But you can do a lot more with a hammer than you can do with your fists.
Same goes for note-taking apps.1
These are simply tools that offer us different ways to work with the material of our thoughts — our notes! — to shape them into whatever we want to.
But, as many have described already, it’s how we use the tool that matters.
What won’t make us smarter is to do what Casey describes in the article:
I waited for the insights to come.
And waited. And waited.
Edit: I published a lightly edited version of this on my blog in an effort to catalogue every time I invoke a hammer in discussions about PKM.
[1]: And same goes for our note-taking practices, which is often overlooked in articles like the OP but, as many have already discussed here, is the thing that actually matters. Latour and co. had it right. It’s not the person, and it’s not the tool, it’s person + tool. Or: we shape our tools, and they shape us.