Has Noteplan's performance improved over the past couple years? I really liked its model, but last time I tried it (early 2020) it got pretty slow as soon as you had a non-trivial amount of data/notes in it. Ironically, given the sentiment (which I share!) about Electron, Obsidian trounces Noteplan for performance.

I stopped using Noteplan as developer doubled the subscription price over the night. Performance was perfect for me, though.

You can try minimal theme, it makes it a look a bit more native.

The aesthetics of all three of these apps seem almost the same?

Bear's aesthetics are definitely a bit nicer. I have switched to Obsidian for extensibility and its use of local files… but Bear has a level of polish that is hard to put into words and which screenshots alone don't quite capture. It just straight-up feels better. (It also has the problem of getting updates very slowly and is really committed to keeping everything in its internal DB, which makes it much less useful to me.)