IMHO you don't need org-roam to use org-mode for note-taking. I use a bunch of plain org-mode files (synchronized between my computers and mobile devices with git and Syncthing) for my notes since 2016, and for me it's the best «second brain» solution I've ever seen. LaTeX formulae! Sheet music (with LilyPond)! Of course, less exotic things like pictures, links, tags are also supported.
I tried to use org-roam, but it's too complex to adopt my already written notes to the org-roam format and structure.
Sorry, but _what exactly_ «it seems to do» from your point of view?
My «second brain» now is almost 300Mb of text, pictures, sound files, PDF and other stuff. As I already mentioned, it contains tables, mathematical formulae, sheet music, cross-references, code samples, UML diagrams and graphs in Graphviz format. It is versioned, indexed by local search engine, analyzed by AI assistant and shared between many computers and mobile devices. And (last but not least) it works: it allows me to solve my tasks way more faster than with the assistance of external, non-personalized tools (like ChatGPT, StackExchange or Google).
I know no tools for all this tasks except org-mode. Well, maybe Evernote in the 2010-s was something similar — but with less features, with more bugs and with worse interface.
Personal note-taking _is_ a complex task per se (well, at least for someone like typical HN visitor). I've seen many note-taking tools, that were ridiculously featureless, stupid and inconvenient because they were _not_ complex enough.
> Sure if one wants to do emacs-gardening it is fine.
2)Org-mode works in Emacs out of the box, you don't need any «emacs-gardening» to use org-mode.
3)The term «Emacs-gardening» itself sound a bit like hate-speech for me. The complexity of Emacs customization is overrated, mostly due to opinions of people who never used Emacs or used it in the previous millennium.
I tried to use org-roam, but it's too complex to adopt my already written notes to the org-roam format and structure.