Former org-mode user here. One of the anti-features of emacs/org-mode for certain people, particularly those who get obsessed with tooling, travel down technology rabbitholes, and are subject to crippling bouts of procrastination, is the extensibility and the common paradigm that one should do everything in emacs.

Ultimately, I switched to using specific tools for specific tasks. For example, I found Zotero a much better way of managing research, while still allowing export to BibTeX.

I still can organize in plain text, I just avoid getting tripped up with endless tool maintenance and customization.