This is not criticism, more like wonderment and curiosity. At 200-300 tabs, isn't it just faster to do a web search or organized bookmarks? Or do you just Ctrl-Tab at light speed through them when you need to find something?
As someone who has a lot of browser tabs, unfortunately no. It's often near impossible to remember the magic query that yielded a particular site as a result and the problem with bookmarks is the overhead that comes with organizing them — most tabs sit in an uncanny valley between long-term usefulness and disposability which would require frequent clean up passes through bookmarks to keep one's bookmarks in a reasonable state.
And as noted by others, these tabs are typically organized by both windows (e.g. one window for apple platform dev stuff, one for android dev, one for shopping, etc) as well as tab groups within those windows.
But just to say it: I also freak out when I see someone with so many tabs open that it's like a little Joy Division cover on the top of their browser.
I understand the existential dread of closing a useful-or-interesting-but-unread tab. But isn't this what bookmarks were created to solve?
The other use case for bookmarks is creating a new tab and navigating to some website like a blank google doc, twitter, hacker news, etc. This is better handled by history. The most frequently used sites can show up on the new tab screen and show up in the results when you start typing in the URL bar.
I don't see any advantage to regular bookmarks for 99% of use cases. They seem to be a feature that exists due to limitations of hardware and browsers from the early days of the web. It's similar to YouTube. In the old days you had to subscribe to channels. Now YouTube is advanced enough to not require you to subscribe to anyone for it to give you content that you want.
It seems like for people with 50+ tabs, rate_of_addition > rate_of_closure.
Saving state is a fair a point, but I can't think of many read pages where that's important to me + I'd trust it to a browser.
some of them I want to keep for "reasons" so every once in a while I do some cleaning.
Firefox has now that beautiful feature that originated in Chrome where each window has a drop down (To right, a rotated "greater than" - or "smaller than" - symbol pointing down) that lists all the tabs ina window, and I can close them from there.
So, cleaning time just got slimmed down greatly :)