A single word have a lot of meanings, a lot of different styles, a lot of different usages, some of which may not be so explicitly thought about.
The act itself of taking notes, processing whatever info you are receiving into your own words already have a value. Try to put them into context, or with a particular future usage in mind have a value. Writing them thinking on sharing it with someone else have another, different value too. All of that even if they disappear tomorrow.
And if they are not supposed to disappear they have more values too. You can put things there to forget or at least not willingly try to keep in your memory. You can relate them with other information, or add more not so much later. And you can check them much later and see how differ your initial ideas, your mind state, or a particular stage on something with what you have now, or how it developed with time.
As something generic enough, is not good to fix its meaning and usage to some opinionated bucket of what it "should be". And build or facilitate on some particular usage should not go badly against some of the things that make it great.
The use of notes is quite open-ended (generic, if you want).
I'd argue it's not about what they "should be", but that they are almost never the end goal. Whatever use you make of them.
I agree with you that they are useful in themselves just because you interpret actively what you receive.
The act itself of taking notes, processing whatever info you are receiving into your own words already have a value. Try to put them into context, or with a particular future usage in mind have a value. Writing them thinking on sharing it with someone else have another, different value too. All of that even if they disappear tomorrow.
And if they are not supposed to disappear they have more values too. You can put things there to forget or at least not willingly try to keep in your memory. You can relate them with other information, or add more not so much later. And you can check them much later and see how differ your initial ideas, your mind state, or a particular stage on something with what you have now, or how it developed with time.
As something generic enough, is not good to fix its meaning and usage to some opinionated bucket of what it "should be". And build or facilitate on some particular usage should not go badly against some of the things that make it great.