Interesting idea! Don’t know if I have the chops to do that successfully
NoteTaker 4 is definitely the closest design to CPN, with a notebook frame and an outline structure. Just not as elegant. It feels old but works. NoteTaker 5 moved to a subscription model, $20 per year. I haven’t tried it.
Curio is more like a canvas that can contain many kinds of content-structures in many different layouts. It’s super-powerful, but for my brain too powerful. I find it dizzying.
Looks like emulators like UTM won’t run MacOS’s for Intel-based Macs on Apple Silicon Macs. So the only way to keep running CPN is on an older Mac.
I still suggest looking at Growly Notes . It’s free so worth a look before paying for something. I did use CPN for years and greatly miss it. CPN and NoteTaker share the same DNA, and possibly even some code, from back in the NeXT days., so NoteTaker will feel most similar to former CPN users, but is is a lesser program.