Just remember — integration doesn’t mean it has to be bad or slow (current Xcode can always be improved).
Windows has at least one tool for tabbed windows though! Check out Stardock Groupy if that sounds like your sort of thing (and I swear there was another one but I can't find it, maybe Groupy is a rebrand?)
But desktop OS vendors seem to still be operating under the paradigm of making their desktop environments as approachable by computer novices as possible. Maybe still a good business decision, but the future for desktop OSs is clearly with professionals and enthusiasts, and it's my hope more advanced human/computer interface approaches will follow.
You can have better window management facilities on Linux, but you have to choose between software that copies the mainstream paradigm of, as you say, pushing new views onto navigation controllers (and I'd add using tabs/split-panes built into the window itself instead of being offloaded to a more sophisticated window manager), or software that's quite rough around the edges.
How is VS Code so popular, if its big brother Visual Studio can do everything it does and more?
Doesn't this signal that the market prefers lightweight IDEs over heavier ones?
Me personally, I would love to have a text editor on the left and the iOS simulator on the right and that's all you need to ship. Xcode Playgrounds attempted to execute this shift, but they still need much more attention until they can function as well as the regular workflow does (which is sad, 'cause the regular workflow sucks).
I only know extremely few people who'd use VS Code for C++, so "popular" is really ecosystem-dependent