How often do you have to take meeting notes? Does it stop once you get promoted to associate?

junior VP and if i'm not busy on something else (i.e. a live transaction), i'm taking notes. 

If anything, as you get more senior, you take less notes and only note the key points and make more abbreviations and symbols 

Once you're more senior you just write down the names of the juniors to ask them for their notes later

Always take notes as an Analyst.

Investors take notes on every call and check those notes frequently as they build relationships with companies.

Of the banking analysts that want to become investors, some take notes on their calls, and some don't.

I'll leave it to you to guess which group is more likely to get a buy-side job.

I don’t take notes, I hate notes. I just yell

It's generally good practice to take notes regardless of rank. This is to confirm who was in the meeting & for potential liability.

As you get more senior, if secretaries or new employees take notes, you could retrieve the same from them. I can't imagine not writing the basics I explained above though.

If you really dislike taking notes, you could make voice memos on your phone that create notes automatically but you must delete the recording immediately after. It's legal to record conversations with 3+ people but you can't share those recordings & are responsible if anything goes wrong. I'd caution against this approach unless you are really disciplined about the deletions.