I've used https://simplenote.com/ for ~5 years because it's clean, fast, cross-platform, supports Markdown, has decent search and tagging features, and it's free & open source.

Every day I open a new note named #[YYMMDD] Scratch, and use it as my daily scratchpad. That makes it easy to search for notes by year, month, and day.

In my experience, simpler is better.