Same here. JupyterLab is just too overwhelming and full of things I don't need. I just need an interactive Python interpreter with support for visualizations and editing code blocks. That's Jupyter Notebook, so I keep using that.
I've been using Jupyter Lab for ages now since it had a dark mode and Notebooks didn't. It's been so many years though maybe that has changed by now and I haven't noticed.
JupyterLab feels like a clunky web based IDE. I check it every year or so and go back to Notebooks.
I used to and still run a Littlest Jupyter Hub: https://tljh.jupyter.org/en/latest/ for my org.
I keep thinking whether migrating to full blown JupyterLab is worth the pain.
With the improvements that Visual Studio Code has made in ipynb support there is even less reason these days.
The biggest thing keeping me on VS Code of course is full blown Copilot support. Whenever I have to fall back to Colab I feel 2-3x less productive.
My workflow is:
* Notebook for exploration/fiddling around 90% of the time is spent here - keeping state open is so convenient
* Extract/export code to regular .py for production