[micimize]

I don't find that "pessimistic" at all, though I don't think it's fair call the serious PKM crowd a cult. Different use cases and projects just have different requirements. The set up for someone like the author here who is doing historical research, will naturally require more organization, and thus naturally go through cycles of reorganization. I think this is similar to how engineering architectures sometimes cycle through idiomatic themes over the course of different refactors.

Though especially now with the potential of LLM-based retrieval I personally worry about keeping things well organized even less than it used to.

[aliasxneo]

For clarity, I wasn't calling the PKM crowd a cult. My point is that after a certain level of engagement (i.e., consuming a ton of written and media-based information about the subject), I realized there was a certain cult-like following present. I'm unsure how much that following constitutes the overall PKM crowd, but I wouldn't say it's the entire crowd or even a large majority.

Like with many things, serious people tend to be a lot quieter (i.e., they are not running YouTube's content treadmill). So, the perception likely doesn't match the reality.