Comment by eviks

> If today, right now, Evernote stopped working, it would take some effort to find a working version, export the files, convert them to markdown or whatever, etc.

No, at your accepted level of the loss of functionality that would be trivial.

  - Launch the app you already have, export
  - Launch another app, import. Could be Obsidian. Here is their guide. https://help.obsidian.md/import/evernote
  - Open results in VSCode and ignore the 10% lost in conversion

> I just don't know how you can claim that Obsidian is more effort to use outside of Obsidian than something proprietary.

Because at every step you trivialize one option and complicate the other. While they're generically equivalent. All the same things apply...

> If you're mostly using plain

If you're mostly using plain notes in Evernote, then your conversion to the same plain markdown will be trivial, so using another plain markdown isn't easier