Huh, I had never heard of Standard Notes before this thread (I saw it mentioned in the OP but ignored it as I am happy with Simple Note) but it looks pretty neat. Yeah, if they had a client that was as fast/easy as nvALT I'd switch.

Not 100% sure, but I think the default Standard Notes client is an Electron application. If battery life is a concern, I'd stick with nvALT. Other note clients can use the Standard Note backend and that seems like a reasonable path, but I would avoid the Standard Notes client.

I'd never heard of Standard Notes until today. Is there any reason I should switch to it (from Simplenote), if I'm not interested in self-hosting?

You don't need to self-host on Standard Notes. The app is focused on privacy and longevity. Check out https://standardnotes.org.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that I would have to self-host. I meant to ask what the advantages were over Simplenote. The option to self-host is one. But I wondered about the other advantages.

I see on that page they say "That's why we built Standard File ... backs up your data to multiple locations, ...", and this sounds interesting (I'm not sure of the best way to backup Simplenote data, except perhaps with a combination of nvpy and git) but the Standard File page doesn't talk about backups at all.

How do you ensure your data doesn't go away?

I use it daily. Plain text information, logs, etc. are the easiest to work with and search. No keywords or tags necessary.