I ended up at the same point after a lot of trying and failing but wanted a _few_ extra features than notepad offers. It's also important to me to be able to take notes in a browser.

I do use logseq/obsidian in my better moments, but having another faster system is so helpful for a number of reasons.

I have been building my own text bookmarklet[0] that I use for this.

[0]: https://github.com/pwillia7/Text_Bookmarklet