I really want my tabs to just be emacs buffers.

Emacs has sooo many different tools to organize and operate on buffers, so different types of users can compose a workflow that works for them, including plain old tabs if they really want. And of course, extensibility, the most important feature imo

And you can do this now of course, with w3m or other plaintext browsers, but it's just not that comfy for most webpages these days. And there's emacs-webkit, but it's still a bit of a pita to install.

I still use qutebrowser for most things, and with i3/sway plus the save-session function, i can get hierarchy and persistence, and that seems sufficient for now...