this gives up relational query, i.e. you knowledge graph is no longer a graph. Notion, Roam and Tana all require relational query. What real world app category are you attempting to model that matches document structure? If the domain can be modeled as topic documents and the documents are small, like an individual google doc, sure this set of constraints may be useful. But that does not match PKM!
It doesn’t give it up, it just moves that aspect to the server. The server can still build an index over the documents in whatever way it likes, perform expensive queries, and only send the results to the client.
An example that matches that document structure is Figma; each document is individually small enough to be synced with the client, document metadata is indexed on the server, and queries over documents take place on the server.
This (moving relational ops to server) does not match the definition of local first provided in the article and gives up most of the value prop the article enumerates in the conclusion. I agree that Figma is a candidate to be implemented primarily as a document CRDT, same as the google doc example i already provided.
Well, the problem an index over multiple documents solves for is also not present in the application presented by the article. The plan for an individual trip (or even a lifetime of trips for most people) is not going to exceed a size that can be handled and indexed on the client.
You're right, the approach totally works for PKM apps with less than, say, 1 person*year of data, which is literally the first sentence I wrote at the top of this thread. (But – there are a lot of architectures that work with casual datasets! Like, store everything in a text file. Or fork bitcoin and run a full node on device, for that matter. What are we trying to accomplish here?)