I never claimed it was more secure than a password manager. Just 'surprisingly' secure. You get something easy to remember with a lot of entropy that's difficult even for someone targeting you to exploit and which mitigates against the more common attack of cracking passwords en-masse from a leak and retrying them.

Yes, it has its own attack vectors, but they don't include things like ads stealing your info from your password manager [0] and apps stealing your passwords from your clipboard [1], both of which are legitimate reasons why you might want an alternative to a password manager.

"home-grown solution" has very negative connotations in infosec and rightfully so. I don't like seeing it in these kind of contexts as it blurs an important distinction between "Don't write your own random number generator if you're creating an app like Signal" (don't do it) vs "Find a solution to deal something as shitty as passwords in a way that works for you" (do it).

Your recommended method might also suit some people better (e.g. people who already carry a notebook around everywhere and guard it carefully).

There are no silver bullets out there. Work out what your needs are and then find a reasonable solution. It might be a password manager. It might not be.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/30/16829804/browser-passwor...

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/11/using...