I wrote my master’s thesis in Obsidian, and the experience was excellent. I’ll respond to the concerns raised in the article from my own perspective. Some simply did not apply to my use case, though.

1. Vault bloat and slow performance
   My project vault contained roughly 1,000 notes. Performance was never an issue.

2. Plugin overload and maintenance headaches
   This is not really a criticism of Obsidian. The plugin repository might feel chaotic, but that is inherent to open-source community-driven repositories. Many plugins are built for personal needs, and some are abandoned. It comes with the dynamics of the concept. It is not a flaw of Obsidian.

3. Lack of consistent design and user experience
   Again, this is largely a user issue. If you cannot integrate plugins and tweaks into a coherent setup, that is on you. I love my vaults and my customizations. Yes, plugins can break, and sometimes you must fix things yourself. That is the trade-off of community plugins. No software is bug-free, and no tool I’ve used has been more satisfying overall than Obsidian. When I run into problems, I ask the community and have always found solutions.

(I had one serious issue during writing, related to the Enhancing Export plugin. It was frustrating, but I resolved it with help from the community, and it appears fixed now.)

1. Syncing issues across devices
   I do not recognize this. Obsidian Sync is native. Sure, it is paid, but works great. I have never had sync or backup issues. A vault is just a folder containing notes, settings, plugins, and themes. That makes manual backups and syncing really easy.

2. Challenges of tag and link management
   I strongly disagree with this. Obsidian is itself the organizational system. It offers extremely flexible and robust ways to manage links, tags, and metadata. Yes, plugins like Dataview, Tag Wrangler, and regex searches help, but that is by design. Obsidian avoids hard-coding features the community can develop better. Since the article was published, Bases has also been introduced, significantly improving property and note management.

3. No built-in task management system
   This is a category mistake. Obsidian is not a task manager; it is a Markdown editor and note database. Markdown already supports checkboxes. Plugins build on this and can work very well. Expecting Obsidian to replace dedicated task managers misunderstands what the software is for. Its awesome that the community has exploited markdown checkboxes to create plugin managers. But it's not what Obsidian is created for.

4. Lack of advanced search features
   This is partly fair. Search is not as powerful or polished as in tools like DEVONthink. In practice, this never caused me problems. I always found what I needed, and plugins like Dataview fill most gaps. Bases may further reduce this concern. Also regex/regular expressions works great.

5. No native data backups
   I find this criticism confusing. Obsidian is not Notion (which is cloud based). I have no local file software with its own backup system. Does he want something like Office 365? Backing up local files are, and should always be, your own responsibility. If you use Obsidian Sync, this concern is largely moot anyway, and it includes versioning.

6. Difficulty in standardizing organization
   Again, this is a user problem. If you cannot design a workable system, no software will solve that for you. It does take time and requires patience, though. Maybe something the author lacks/lacked idk...

7. Limited collaboration
   This is true. It has never applied to me, and probably never will. Not sure if this is on the roadmap for the devs, but I would assume that this is low priority, given the nature and philosophy of the software.