"I believe this kind of work doesn’t share a lot of commonality with the research that readers of HN would do - although it is a very effective tool for some stuff we do."
I'm not sure what your expectations of the "normal" HN reader are but lots of people engage in stuff like creative writing, essays, general research to esoteric topics and so on.
For example I have a notebook I constantly scribble on. I've moved a portion of that scribbling to a zettlekasteln like system to a great benefit - although I just use text files and in a simple onedrive directory structure.
I'm not sure what your expectations of the "normal" HN reader are but lots of people engage in stuff like creative writing, essays, general research to esoteric topics and so on.
For example I have a notebook I constantly scribble on. I've moved a portion of that scribbling to a zettlekasteln like system to a great benefit - although I just use text files and in a simple onedrive directory structure.