Short life times for vim are more a thing on remote sessions, e.g. for server configuration. I agree with you, that such a work flow is suboptimal for the general development case, so I will just describe what works for me:

Do not close vim.

I keep a main vim instance which has different buffers open. These buffers have their own history, e.g. undo-tree, etc. And keep in mind, that it takes time to get adjusted to vim, otherwise one gets overwhelmed quite quickly. E.g. I suggest to ignore windows and tabs at the beginning and get comfortable with buffers first (e.g. mostly I only use buffers).