Right now I'm kind of leaning toward the latter... I don't know how much it matters to track the kWh you charge, your start and end battery charge, or the time it takes, but I do it anyway when I'm writing down how much I pay. For free stations and home I don't worry about it.

As I use the EV more I'll probably learn what's most important to track. But if the purpose originally was to track bad gas, makes sense the purpose now would be to track a bad charge. So then it would make sense to track everything outside the home, even free stations, which isn't that hard for me since I don't do it a lot. But it means writing down that battery info at each charge.

The tricky thing is with an ICE car, it's easy to have a complete log of every time you've ever refueled (if you start on Day 1). But if you can charge an EV at home... What do you choose to record? Every time you plug it in at night? Every time you charge away from home? Every time you have to pay to charge?

I've been charging at home since I got my EV, and have charged plenty of places for free and not written it down.

Started doing this with my last car as a thing I guess people don't do anymore... did it by habit because my parents did it, and they started because I guess you used to get bad gas occasionally and they wanted to be able to track down where it happened if they did.

Never came up for my ICE car, but with relatively less mature EV technology, figured it's worth keeping the habit.