I found Zotero very confusing to use. But maybe I am not the target demographic. I have always just used vim txt files for notes, using cli tools like grep to find what I need.
It is very good for also downloading and keeping track of PDFs. It is primarily targeted at academics. And for many of us, it’s a great tool for keeping track of what papers we are currently reading, or want to keep for later. It can be hard to manage citations, PDFs, etc… in a text document. I know some people do, but I like being able to use a bookmarklet/extension to add a new paper to my lists.
To add to the other comment, Zotero can also download the PDF for you if you just have a citation (if it can find it) and it also integrates into Word, Google Docs, etc. for citations when writing research papers.
It's especially useful for multiple people writing the same research paper as the library can be shared.
It sounds like you might not be the target demo. Zotero is mainly for generating bibiliographies not note taking. It has notes in it but it is pretty basic.
More like a life saver. It is hard to imagine the time it takes to fix references in a review article, never mind a PhD thesis, even with a proper bibliography tool. A bit less so with LaTeX, but still very useful.
