100% this.

Niklas Luhmann (who invented the Zettelkasten) invented his system because he was an insanely productive scholar, not the other way around.

I think apart from just writing, the one thing that feels like it matters to me is rewriting and consolidation. Having years of notes you never revisit does very little. What is good about some of the systems is that they provide a framework for consolidation and forcing you to keep reviewing things. But I find the specifics of how you end up reviewing and consolidating changes very little, as long as you do.

If anything, I think re-writing works better than interlinking notes, because it forces you to consider the whole. But at some point some things becomes static enough that putting it aside and linking to it may be worthwhile.

80% (random number that seems reasonable) of the value of notes is the act of writing them the first time. For the other 20% they deserve more effort, rewriting and origination are both useful for them.

Agree with that, in that rewriting should include deciding which notes are worth just leaving as is, so that what you rewrite reflects what is still relevant and that will usually as you say be a very small percentage of the whole.

Rewriting to me also seems to reduce the need to refer back to the notes even further, because it effectively acts as a revision also for the notes I decide are not worth summarising, and the few bits that might still be beneficial gets carried along in the rewritten summaries.

haha you can also call it the 80-20 rule too be fancy

If you were fetishizing someone else's system with no thought to your needs, it's good you stopped. But don't you find that you write and research better with a better command of your notes and documents? Do you not much care what sources end up going into your writing and to what extent?

The written record provides an extension of the natural human memory.

It can't fix "you're a bad writer."

And maybe isn't even useful if you have really good memory.

But no need to posit "magic" for an improvement.