The Downside of Using Org-Id Links in Org-Roam

In org-roam v2, a new requirement was added for all notes to have an org ID. This has a few notable downsides.

It duplicates unique identifiers. Notes already have a unique ID, the file name which is enforced to be unique by the file system. Changing a file name should be equivalent to changing a unique ID—you probably don’t want to do that (and it’s a sign you should probably delete it and start a new note).

It clutters the note. The preamble alone is a minimum of 4 lines compared to 1 before due to the addition of the :PROPERTIES: drawer.

It hurts portability. Previously, org-roam files used to ‘just work’ in Working Copy, including links to other files. It doesn’t anymore because of ID links. It also further locks the implementation in with org-mode which is lacking parsers to make it more ubiquitous (go-org is a good option, but many more are started and abandoned).