I’m used to taking notes in the traditional hierarchical method. That’s what we’re taught too, with how notebooks in school are usually structured. Note-taking apps also organize notes in this way due to familiarity. Personally, I still have a bad habit of making incredibly long and in-depth notes much like a report. That ends up with a huge document of fleeting information that usually doesn’t get updated after it has served its purpose.
Linking notes to each other creates context deeper than just definitively and rigidly saying “X is related to Y and Z”. It’s more extensible too since you can just keep linking and backlinking to add more context. The popular term for this is a digital garden, especially in context of sharing these linked thoughts to the public through a hosting service on the internet. Basically, it is notetaking as if you were making an ever-changing Wiki for your personal learnings.
More contexts → Bigger picture → More capacity and entropy leading to a Eureka Moment → Less static, more dynamic notes that grow along with us instead of getting discarded.