If on the Mac ecosystem, Bear is Apple notes but with fewer sync bugs and more useful features (like a close cousin of markdown and amazing tagging). I've switched to that for notes that might stick around for a while (from Evernote and Apple notes, though I still forward emails into the former as a convenient archive). For transient notes (like shopping lists etc.) I just use drafts on iOS. Seems to work for me after years of frustration with Evernote and Apple notes.
I'm not sure how long ago you tried Apple Notes but I've use it all the time now after trying many apps. I don't have any sync problems and it has good support for images, pen input, tables, styles etc.
For anything more technical I use Quiver which supports MarkDown, code with pretty printing, LaTex and diagram markup, but it doesn't have an iPad editor (just reader).
I switched to Bear after having significant sync problems with apple notes (it was fine in iOS 10 but never ever worked properly in iOS 11). It was always OK on my Mac.
From various Apple support forum requests it seems that a lot of people were having similar - but also a number were totally unaffected.
My biggest gripe with Apple Notes is if I throw some snippet of code in there it mutates the quotes to "smart quotes" and thus the code produces syntax errors if I try and use it again :(
Bear lacks folders. Sure, it has tagging, but it's really a poor man's organization tool; for example, you can't create a new folder and then drag and drop a bunch of notes into it. Changing the "location" of multiple notes requires search and replace, something I don't think Bear even does (at least not the iOS version). Tags also clutter notes visually. Do you put them at the beginning? At the end? Either way you will see the tags. Very strange for an app which boasts about providing "beautiful" notes. There are ergonomic issues; copying a note into another app includes the tags, for example. Selecting a whole note and clicking the "italics" shortcuts will make the tags italics, too. And so on.
Same goes for the Markdown. Maybe some people find Markdown codes scattered all over the place "beautiful", but I don't.
Bear also doesn't handle images very well, at least on iOS (I don't remember how it behaves on the Mac). Images are rendered full width. You can't create nice grids of images like you can with Evernote.
Bear is awesome. I like it enough that the thought of finding an alternative hasn’t occurred to me in a long time.
As others have mentioned, organization can feel like a bit of a pain sometimes with how you have to organize with tags, but it hasn’t really hindered me as much as I thought it would.
I like Bear's more polished look but as far as I can find through a dozen apps I tried, only Apple Note allows documents to be encrypted. It's sad no app cares about it.
