[spaboleo]

I am wondering for a long time whether this differs from person to person based on their preferred mode of thinking.

As a seemingly overly visual thinker the aspect of making several small decisions about how to layout what I'm writing down by hand also seems to play a huge role in that. I have to make positioning and thereby spacing and sizing decisions, choose the color, as well as making decisions on in what style (caps, cursive, script) I write each letter. I can easily use graphical elements like lines, arrows, boxes, etc.

Anything created digitally by primarily typing will always have a more dynamic and flowing nature, while following the linearity of the typed sequence of characters. It takes away a lot of the decisions that I have to make when laying out a handwritten note.

Anecdotally, I seem to remember mindmaps created with digital tools that rearrange elements automatically based on available space much less than hand-drawn ones. Yet, those come with their own downsides.