The thing I picked up from this is that it’s fine to have very short notes. The false starts with my engineering journal are, I think, partly because I write it like documentation. I should just write terse bullets. If I badly need to know more detail, that bullet and date is likely enough to excavate some commits.
You might enjoy something that takes advantage of this type of note-taking, like logseq (https://logseq.com/). The way I understand it (I haven't tried it out yet) is that it builds up hierarchies from bullet lists and can organize your knowledge base with them in mind, which means your daily notes can have a hierarchical bullet list and potentially you could query for every day you worked on a particular feature in a particular project very easily.
I think this misses the point of daily note taking, at least for me. I don’t care about anything more than a week old and really only a couple of days because all I’m using it to do is organise myself in the near future and give myself a little reward every time I finish something. I keep it public so people can also see what I’ve been up to. Insights into work are better left to other tools that also track work not someone’s personal notes.
