I struggled with them for years because in the back of my head they felt like a necessity.
And when I actively banished them from my note-taking flow, it was like the skies opened up. I realized that what I should be doing is simple "being verbose enough in the note taking such that searching later is robust against me trying to remember what I tagged things."
As in, it's a minimal marginal amount of effort to write for "future you" as if that person were a stranger, not someone who remembered your tags.
(fyi it's http://zim-wiki.org all day every day for what I do. I've tried most all the others and I keep coming back.)
