It's just I've been told that no one who got a state rank or a band 6 used pre made notes. Like how do you stand out if you use notes that everyone else is using? On the other hand making your own notes takes time and as you said that time could be better spent practicing. Essentially what I'm asking is, knowing what you achieved, if you had access to the resources that I had would you have made your own notes or used pre made notes?
Unless the person who told you that knows every single state ranker/Band 6 student in PDHPE (or whatever), they can't make that claim
everyone works differently and everyone learns in slightly different ways
In some subjects, there is a right answer and a wrong answer. You don't need to stand out - You need to get marks. You get marks by getting things correct and showing correct procedures. That comes from content knowledge and experience - How that is obtained is up to the student!
In other subjects, you stand out based on your arguments. You would never learn those from a set of notes anyway - Those come from you and the pre-prepared notes give you ways to back up those arguments. Facts, evidence, statistics. Using the notes doesn't disadvantage you; even if others are using them, because the argument is yours and the way you write is yours. Two people using identical evidence can/will produce markedly different essays
So if I had my time again, yeah, I'd use pre-prepared notes in places that I previously wrote my own. My Physics notes were inherently useless compared to my posters, beyond just being a collated source of info. I'd buy that and save myself 100 hours in a heartbeat, then spend that time doing practice questions. For a subject like Legal, I'd probably do the same - But still make summaries of evidence around
my arguments
It's all dependent on the person. What works for me may not work for you - But don't feel guilty about using pre-prepared notes if you think they will help you! There is no hidden trap - As long as you don't think buying notes automatically gives you the knowledge. You do have to read them, actively work to understand them, and persistently apply them