We do live in this paradigm of everything being in the cloud and clients are stupid and constantly need to sync, often times in a "stop the world" fashion. Last time I used Twitter web I saw three spinners in the same screen. So that's a big factor as well. It's incredibly poor engineering culture imo, but again those are there because that's what they wanted to build.
They are all much more powerful than Apple notes but they are so slow by the time they are ready for my input I have forgotten what I was trying to note down.