I hear great things about OrbStack; unfortunately the licensing tied to their free offering doesn't play nicely with corporate environments (and we're cheap!).
I switched to Colima instead and couldn't be happier.
After years of trialling a variety of notebook setups, I eventually fell back to vscode & git. I've even given up on Markdown (nothing wrong with it, I just realised I never actually view my own notes in parsed Markdown so I stopped bothering).
All I need is a file structure that I understand, and an editor for typing and searching :)
Git is great for (i) persistence, (ii) availability and (iii) the merge flow encourages me to review/clean changes before merging them to main.
Very similar experience. My instinct would be to fight the sickness and push through, but in reality you need to stop immediately and try again in a few hours. Your tolerance tends to build exponentially!
I switched to Colima instead and couldn't be happier.